Technology and Culture最新文献

{"title":"El pensamiento sobre la técnica en México [Thinking about technology in Mexico] ed. by Irving Samadhi Aguilar Rocha and José Francisco Barrón Tovar (review)","authors":"Israel G. Solares","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a926328","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a926328","url":null,"abstract":"<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>El pensamiento sobre la técnica en México [Thinking about technology in Mexico]</em> ed. by Irving Samadhi Aguilar Rocha and José Francisco Barrón Tovar <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Israel G. Solares (bio) </li> </ul> <em>El pensamiento sobre la técnica en México [Thinking about technology in Mexico]</em> Edited by Irving Samadhi Aguilar Rocha and José Francisco Barrón Tovar. Mexico City: Bonilla Artigas Editores/Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Morelos, 2022. Pp. 271. <p>This volume is a collection of contributions to the colloquium \"El pensamiento sobre la técnica en México,\" held in September 2020. It collects the works of the scholars in eleven chapters, with an introduction by the editors and a preface by Javier Oscar Blanco. The chapters are organized chronologically, starting in the sixteenth century and ending in current times.</p> <p>As with many books based on conference papers, the topics and methods differ widely, and the chapters vary drastically in extension and overall quality. Chapters 1, 10, 11, and 12 define themselves as philosophical essays on the uses of technology in the Mexican space defined broadly, dealing with baroque machines, tortilla production, and digital technologies in the classroom. Chapters 2 through 9 are analyses of the thinking of José Gaos, Emilio Uranga, José Revueltas, Octavio Paz, Samuel Ramos, Fabián Giménez Gatto, and Naief Yehya. There is no concluding chapter.</p> <p>The main temporality of the book is the twentieth century, and the strongest contributions are the core chapters focused on Samuel Ramos, Emilio Uranga, and José Revueltas. The chapter by Eloy Caloca Lafont analyzes the thinking of Samuel Ramos in the 1930s and his criticisms of <em>maquinismo</em>, as a danger of the conquest of the machine over human life but also as part of the expansion of the United States into the world. The chapters by José Francisco Barrón and Irving Samadhi Aguilar uncover the thinking of Emilio Uranga and his reflection on the properties of the machine, between death and life, between the animal and the artificial, and between the given and the produced. These chapters show how a Mexican writer, in the years of the \"Mexican miracle\" (the 1950s), reflected on the aesthetic characteristics of reproduction differently from Walter Benjamin, taking the dead needle of the phonograph as the leading example of reproduction. The contribution by Sergio Lomelí and Tamara Valencia depicts the technological implications of the thinking of communist activist and writer José Revueltas and his comments on the fetishization of technical rationality and how pervasive it was in both the capitalist and the socialist spheres. Along with the pieces on José Gaos and Octavio Paz, these chapters provide an appealing narrative about the thinking on technological knowledge in Mexico and the dialogue and parallels with similar movements around the globe, during the emergenc","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"54 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-05-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141152689","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Radio for the Millions: Hindi-Urdu Broadcasting Across Borders by Isabel Huacuja Alonso (review)","authors":"Pradip Ninan Thomas","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a926350","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a926350","url":null,"abstract":"<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Radio for the Millions: Hindi-Urdu Broadcasting Across Borders</em> by Isabel Huacuja Alonso <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Pradip Ninan Thomas (bio) </li> </ul> <em>Radio for the Millions: Hindi-Urdu Broadcasting Across Borders</em> By Isabel Huacuja Alonso. New York: Columbia University Press, 2023. Pp. 312. <p>A comprehensive history of early radio in South Asia has yet to be written. In fact, ham radio, radio clubs, imperial radio, clandestine radio, and anti-colonial radio have contributed to the tapestry of radio broadcasting on the Indian subcontinent beginning from the early 1920s onward. Isabel Alonso's well-researched and textured cultural history of radio on the subcontinent contributes to our understanding of some aspects of this history. Alonso uses the term \"radio resonance\" to make a case for the resilience of radio listenership in an era characterized by resolute efforts to cleanse and purify the composite cultural traditions associated with what was once the lingua franca of North India, Hindustani, which was based on both the languages of Hindi and Urdu. In the context of contemporary attempts to purify Indian culture of its Islamic influence and bend broadcasting to the political project of Hindu nationalism, resonance as an act of resistance and enactment of citizenship offers a way to understand commonalities and solidarities across the divides of border, nation, and state. In this sense the soundscape, both personal and collective, remains an important counter to the attempts to contain and subdue the imaginary of citizens to majoritarian visions. There is another equally important contribution that Alonso makes—which is the case that the book makes for our need to understand historical continuities when dealing with the histories of technologies such as that of radio broadcasting.</p> <p>Alonso's narrative is built around studies of broadcasting linked to three historical events—World War II, independence, and the 1965 war between India and Pakistan. The key story outlined in the volume is of the factors that led to the gradual decline of Hindustani as the language of broadcasting in North India and the emergence of Hindi- and Urdu-centric broadcasting in India and Pakistan after these two countries gained their independence in 1947. In India, successive ministers of information and broadcasting, including Sardar Vallabhai Patel and in particular B. V. Keskar, were expressly <strong>[End Page 733]</strong> involved in cleansing All India Radio (AIR) of its <em>tawaifi</em> (courtesan, lowbrow) Hindustani/Muslim influences, especially film music, and its replacement with \"uncontaminated,\" \"pure\" Hindi/Hindu music traditions. Alonso recounts the well-known story of Radio Ceylon cashing in on Indian film music and the migration of radio listenership from AIR to Radio Ceylon in the context of experiments with radio nationalisms in India. A key takeaway from this vol","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"11 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-05-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140926406","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Hacking Diversity: The Politics of Inclusion in Open Technology Cultures by Christina Dunbar-Hester (review)","authors":"Maria B. Garda","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a926354","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a926354","url":null,"abstract":"<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Hacking Diversity: The Politics of Inclusion in Open Technology Cultures</em> by Christina Dunbar-Hester <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Maria B. Garda (bio) </li> </ul> <em>Hacking Diversity: The Politics of Inclusion in Open Technology Cultures</em> By Christina Dunbar-Hester. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020. Pp. 280. <p>The open technology movement brought us the Linux operating system and the Firefox web browser. Its historical roots reach deep into the hacker and hobbyist cultures of the twentieth century. Hence, perhaps not surprisingly, open technology communities are facing the same problem as many other DIY cultures: lack of diversity. Since the 2000s, these issues have been challenged by a growing number of activists and social change advocates. Their volunteer work within open technology groups is the topic of <em>Hacking Diversity</em>, written by the leading scholar on democratic <strong>[End Page 740]</strong> control, Christina Dunbar-Hester. In her book, she poses a simple yet increasingly relevant question: \"What happens when ordinary people try to define and tackle a large social problem?\" (p. 3).</p> <p>In sociology, diversity reflects on the levels of inclusion of historically underrepresented groups in a social environment (e.g., workplace). Dunbar-Hester embraces diversity as an emic concept, \"emanating from within the communities that form the subject of this study\" (p. 17). There are arguably as many definitions of diversity as there are policymakers, but this kind of ethnographic approach allows the author to focus on the everyday practices of her respondents.</p> <p>Influenced by works of Gabriella Coleman (<em>Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy</em>, 2015) and Sarah Davies (<em>Hackerspaces</em>, 2017), this book is a result of many years of extensive fieldwork and historical contextualization. Each of the six main chapters of <em>Hacking Diversity</em> introduces the reader to various examples of hacking, making, and crafting practices and communities. I especially applaud the attention paid to hobbyists from underrepresented demographic groups and borderline interventions, such as the experimental cryptodance event in Montreal that \"conjoined arts practice with pedagogy about the principles of cryptography in computing\" (p. 96).</p> <p>Dunbar-Hester directs much attention toward questions of social justice, and her observations are always framed with care and sensitivity toward the cultural complexity of the problem. The book is at its best when it critically investigates the relations of power in the open technology communities, be it online or in Brooklyn. To paraphrase the author, there is some deep irony in the fact that the previously discriminated social groups of geeks and nerds are now reproducing the dynamics of injustice within their own circles (p. 67). This kind of study will be of great value to future North American–oriented resear","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"79 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-05-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140926361","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Brown Skins, White Coats: Race Science in India, 1920–66 by Projit Bihari Mukharji, and: Medicine, Science, and Making Race in Civil War America by Leslie A. Schwalm, and: Masters of Health: Racial Science and Slavery in U.S. Medical Schools by Christopher D. E. Willoughby (review)","authors":"Chanda Prescod-Weinstein","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a926334","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a926334","url":null,"abstract":"<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Brown Skins, White Coats: Race Science in India, 1920–66</em> by Projit Bihari Mukharji, and: <em>Medicine, Science, and Making Race in Civil War America</em> by Leslie A. Schwalm, and: <em>Masters of Health: Racial Science and Slavery in U.S. Medical Schools</em> by Christopher D. E. Willoughby <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Chanda Prescod-Weinstein (bio) </li> </ul> <em>Brown Skins, White Coats: Race Science in India, 1920–66</em> By Projit Bihari Mukharji. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022. Pp. 348. <em>Medicine, Science, and Making Race in Civil War America</em> By Leslie A. Schwalm. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2023. Pp. 215. <em>Masters of Health: Racial Science and Slavery in U.S. Medical Schools</em> By Christopher D. E. Willoughby. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022. Pp. 267. <p>Recently, I visited a university to deliver a distinguished guest lecture. I chose as my topic the question of why particle physics is an area of research worth pursuing, and in the lecture, I attempted to answer. After-ward, a brown-skinned student approached me and asked, \"I was wondering, as a fellow mixed person, how do you phenotypically experience Black spaces?\" A bit taken aback, I explained that I have never publicly identified myself as mixed but always as Black, and that I think \"y'all students\" need to stop doing race science. He looked at me with a genuinely confused expression on his face: he did not understand why I was mentioning race science at all. This story alone makes the case for why new scholarship on the history and development of race science continue to be not only intellectually but also socially and politically significant. With <em>Brown Skins, White Coats</em> by Projit Bihari Mukharji, <em>Medicine, Science, and Making Race in Civil War America</em> by Leslie A. Schwalm, and <em>Masters of Health</em> by Christopher D. E. Willoughby, we gain new perspectives on how the race science of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries produced the social power relations that govern our twenty-first-century lives.</p> <p>As Mukharji explains in <em>Brown Skins, White Coats</em>, the first known use of \"phenotype\" (according to the Oxford English Dictionary) was in 1910 by botanists, and it emphasized the observed appearance of an organism (p. 105). <em>Brown Skins</em> is primarily concerned with concepts of race that go beyond the visible, which is why Mukharji's discussion of phenotype is closer to the middle than the beginning of the book. He explains attempts by Indian scientists to delineate a concept of race through the ability to taste phenylthiocarbamide, an example of how conceptions of race need not <strong>[End Page 701]</strong> necessarily rely on visible markers. This note about phenotype is significant in part because it is a word that I hear commonly invoked in American social discourse about the appearance of African-des","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"35 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-05-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140939072","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Labor's End: How the Promise of Automation Degraded Work by Jason Resnikoff (review)","authors":"Andrew L. Russell","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a926336","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a926336","url":null,"abstract":"<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Labor's End: How the Promise of Automation Degraded Work</em> by Jason Resnikoff <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Andrew L. Russell (bio) </li> </ul> <em>Labor's End: How the Promise of Automation Degraded Work</em> By Jason Resnikoff. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2022. Pp. 272. <p><em>Labor's End</em> charts the formative years of automation as the concept was embraced and debated across a variety of interest groups in the United States. Americans—including technologists, executives, politicians, intellectuals, and organized labor—latched onto it as part of their broader efforts to define the meaning and future of industrial work. Historians of technology will appreciate Jason Resnikoff's starting point, which is that automation was not merely a dispassionate description of engineering and industrial practice; rather, it was the site of ideological conflict, a confluence of technology, business, politics, and labor at a time of American ascendance.</p> <p>The book builds from a provocative assertion: Americans believed automation would drive industrial progress, ultimately leading to the full-scale abolition of human labor. Resnikoff emphasizes that automation was seen widely as the harbinger of utopian outcomes, including the elimination of human oppression, a new era of leisure, and the resolution of the conflict between capital and labor. But it was never robust or stable enough to carry <strong>[End Page 707]</strong> this world-historical burden and did not, in fact, liberate workers or substitute freedom and leisure for labor. Rather, Resnikoff argues, automation doubled down on Taylorism, sped up industrial work, and undermined worker autonomy and well-being.</p> <p>Readers will not have to guess about the moral commitments of the author, who on the first page of the book expresses gratitude for the lessons he learned as an organizer for the UAW. Accordingly, there is little surprise that the villains of <em>Labor's End</em> include capitalist managers and technocrats, as well as science fiction authors, intellectuals of the New Left, and leaders of organized labor who, seduced by the promises of liberation via automation, too easily surrendered their leverage to control the means of production. Resnikoff displays no interest in or sympathy for, say, the dilemmas faced by Chandlerian managers fighting gales of creative destruction.</p> <p>The first five chapters in <em>Labor's End</em> investigate the early history of automation in the postwar automobile and computing industries, as well as the discursive contests around automation among intellectuals (including science fiction writers), federal policymakers, and the New Left. The latter chapters deal with automation and domestic work, and the compelling movement for the \"humanization\" of industrial work in the early 1970s. A brief conclusion skips ahead to our twenty-first-century world of Amazon's style of automati","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"82 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-05-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140939079","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"El pequeño intervencionista: Ayuntamiento, empresarios y regulación del mercado telefónico en la Ciudad de México, 1881–1915 [The small interventionist: City hall, businessmen and the regulation of the telephone market in Mexico City, 1881–1915] by Víctor Cuchí Espada (review)","authors":"Gisela Mateos","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a926329","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a926329","url":null,"abstract":"<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>El pequeño intervencionista: Ayuntamiento, empresarios y regulación del mercado telefónico en la Ciudad de México, 1881–1915 [The small interventionist: City hall, businessmen and the regulation of the telephone market in Mexico City, 1881–1915]</em> by Víctor Cuchí Espada <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Gisela Mateos (bio) </li> </ul> <em>El pequeño intervencionista: Ayuntamiento, empresarios y regulación del mercado telefónico en la Ciudad de México, 1881–1915 [The small interventionist: City hall, businessmen and the regulation of the telephone market in Mexico City, 1881–1915]</em> By Víctor Cuchí Espada. Mexico City: Palabra de Clío, 2023. Pp. 284. <p><em>El pequeño intervencionista</em> is a meticulous study of the economic and social conditions that opened, and in some cases closed, the incorporation of telephones. While the book is not immersed in the historiographical discussions of the history of technology, it is the first scholarly book that digs into the history of telephony in Mexico. It is an economic history of the new Mexican telecommunications market and its agreements and disagreements with the political regime, as well as the tortuous and winding roads to regulations. The author addresses how the telephone is a technology that required several political, social, economic, and technical <strong>[End Page 691]</strong> gears, which transformed it into an essential tool for exercising power as well as citizenship. The documentary sources consulted are mainly from archives in Mexico, which, although it allows for a careful analysis of the national case, leaves out the possibility of a transnational history in which foreign companies played a fundamental role in the distribution, management, and expertise of telephones. However, the market in Mexico was incipient and with no regulations at all. The book consists of four parts that focus on how the telephone arrived in Mexico and how the telephone market and telephonic services became regulated in Mexico City. Most of this story takes place during the Porfiriato (1876–1911) and the first five years of the Mexican Revolution (1910–20). In the period covered in the book, 1881–1915, the Mexican state was being built and providing its institutions with new regulatory instruments.</p> <p>In the first section, the author analyzes how the business class strengthened itself through its relations with influential people in the government, taking advantage of the possibilities of doing business in the country. This situation encouraged the creation of monopolies, and it was precisely in this environment that the Compañía Telefónica Mexicana was created as a private company with capital from foreign investors. The patents for the telephone sets were in the hands of foreign companies and none of the parts were built and assembled in Mexico, since the patents did not allow them to be built outside the United States and Sweden. Telepho","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"46 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-05-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140939527","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Everyday Resistance to White Supremacy: Walking and Cycling While Black in Springs, South Africa, 1950s–1970s","authors":"Njogu Morgan","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a926312","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a926312","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>abstract:</p><p>This article explores why white supremacists regard self-directed mobility by people of color as threatening by examining a controversy that unfolded in a mining town called Springs during the apartheid era in South Africa. Drawing on archives, oral histories, and testimonies, it shows how white residents of Selcourt and Selection Park, along with their allies in the town council, prevented Black workers from walking and cycling through the suburbs. Infrastructure and social disciplinary institutions proved effective in forcing Black workers to largely comply. It argues that the white supremacist disciplinary imperative against the workers arose directly from the characteristics of their mode of mobility. In their open embodiment, free from the confines of mechanized transport, and slow speeds, the workers engaged in a sustained refusal of spatial segregation. The article highlights how racial difference as an analytical category sheds light on mobility control within regimes of white supremacy.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"24 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-05-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140939067","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"¡Alerta! Engineering on Shaky Ground by Elizabeth Reddy (review)","authors":"Magdalena Gil","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a926327","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a926327","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;p&gt; &lt;span&gt;Reviewed by:&lt;/span&gt; &lt;ul&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;!-- html_title --&gt; &lt;em&gt;¡Alerta! Engineering on Shaky Ground&lt;/em&gt; by Elizabeth Reddy &lt;!-- /html_title --&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt; Magdalena Gil (bio) &lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ul&gt; &lt;em&gt;¡Alerta! Engineering on Shaky Ground&lt;/em&gt; By Elizabeth Reddy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2023. Pp. 226. &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;¡Alerta!&lt;/em&gt; is a well-researched and engaging book that provides valuable insights into the socio-technical challenges of using technology to mitigate the impact of extreme natural events such as earthquakes. The book defies the traditional view on technological development that concedes little or no agency to peripheric countries, who appear as mere recipients of modern \"Western\" science. In contrast, it focuses on the Sistema de Alerta Sísmica Mexicano (SASMEX), the world's oldest earthquake early warning system.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;SASMEX was created in 1989, and it is still active today. It works by issuing a warning within seconds of an earthquake. The warnings are sent to a variety of public and private entities, and also broadcast through the media and over loudspeakers in public places in Mexico City. It is based on the Time-to-Arrival (TTA) method, which uses the difference in arrival times of seismic waves at different locations to estimate the location and magnitude of an earthquake. But SASMEX is much more than that. Reddy tells us that the system also depends on a number of factors, including the political will to support the system, the public's understanding of it, the availability of resources to implement and maintain it, the perceived legitimacy of the alerts, and the willingness of people to comply with it. In other words, the book shows us that the system is part of a broader socio-technical ensemble that includes other technologies, people, and the Earth.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Reddy explores the history, development, and implementation of SASMEX from 1989 to present-day Mexico, using varied archival sources from local newspapers to scientific works from the Union Geofisica Mexicana. But the core of the book is her extensive ethnographic work in Mexico, observing and documenting the practices of communities living in risk zones, and also the scientists, engineers, and government officials who organize and enact SASMEX daily.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;While exploring the history of SASMEX, Reddy focuses on the issue of environmental monitoring and how it has increasingly become a techno-scientific endeavor, heavily based on data analysis. Through her case study, she explores the challenges and opportunities of this approach, arguing that this technology not only mitigates the potentially huge damage that earthquakes can have in physical structures but also social inequalities. The system is especially relevant for people in low-income communities, who are often the most affected. This is the value of the models, and the reason why the Mexican state has invested in a system to support it. &lt;strong&gt;[End Page 688]&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;But SASMEX can also give false alarms. Since the TT","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"119 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-05-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140939070","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Seeds, Dams, and Khipus: Latin America's Eclectic Recent History of Technology","authors":"Pedro Reynolds-Cuéllar, Diego Cerna-Aragon, Eden Medina","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a926311","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a926311","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>abstract:</p><p>Scholarship on Latin America's history of technology has expanded significantly in recent years. By reviewing articles in English- and Spanish-language journals from 2012 to the first half of 2023, we illustrate the emerging themes, geographies, and methodologies in this literature. The four main themes we identify are industrialization, institutions and policies, infrastructure, and moving beyond technological adaptation. We also highlight two emerging themes: Indigenous technologies and the circulation of knowledge. We conclude that the scholarship has generally moved in three directions: the study of technologies associated with traditional economic activities in the region (e.g., monocrop agriculture), national industrialization and modernization processes, and cases that demonstrate alternative ways of knowing the world and how communities use these types of knowledge. We suggest that deepening the connections between these three lines of research could be fruitful for future work.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"46 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-05-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140939305","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Fragile Foundations: Tracing Argentina's Semiconductor Saga amid Institutional Turmoil","authors":"Fernanda A. Soca, Mariana E. Di Bello","doi":"10.1353/tech.2024.a926315","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2024.a926315","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>abstract:</p><p>This article suggests that the persistent pattern of political and economic instability in Argentina has affected the development of semiconductor technology in Argentina, affecting secure resources, financial stability, and appropriate institutional frameworks. This article reconstructs Argentina's history of semiconductor technology to understand the initial research, development, and production of semiconductor technology and the emergence of the field of electronics knowledge in a peripheral country like Argentina. In-depth interviews with key players and analysis of institutional documents shed light on the achievements of the protagonists and their relationship to the country's political and economic context.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":49446,"journal":{"name":"Technology and Culture","volume":"28 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-05-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140939402","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}