American ideas about technology
- the blood pressure cuff was initially rejected by doctors because it took away the value of their skill in reading the patient directly by pulse diagnosis.
- The machine gave more accurate information, but other information was lost.
- technology often takes away
the value of a skill that workers have
- doctors had the power to reject at least temporarily a new technology
- this shows how our ideas about technology influence the development of technology
We think about technology in
different ways:
- we compare it to nature
(the other way of doing things is more natural)--eg. genetic
engineered
foods
- U.S.--is the end result natural
- England--is the means of getting there natural
- Germany--is the
research organized in an open and fair way, don't do research until you
have dealt with possible ethical concerns
- we ask about costs (what is the cost/benefit ratio)
- how do we value accurate limited information relative to
broad subjective information--how sure do we feel we need to be before
acting on information
- we think about how it affects social status
- we think about how it affects skill
- how does it affect being able to take pride in work
- we think about how it relates to gender--eg. robot lawn mowers
- it will confuse our ideas about the family (and we value
families)
- we ask questions about God (are we playing God?)
- and we compare it with our ideas of government--eg. the automobile fits American ideas of freedom and individualism
- in the early republic people worried about whether technology was following God's will--eg. pain relief for childbirth
- the romantics worried about what technology was doing to skill--the loss of creative expression. But those who favored technology argued that it would liberate people, not enslave them.
some artists of the mid-20th century tried to romaticize and poeticize the man-made world.
iron and steel were the defining new material, as in suspension bridges such as the Brooklyn Bridge
- Brooklyn Bridge
The Brooklyn Bridge
was completed in 1883, connecting Manhattan and Brooklyn, the longest
suspension bridge in the world at the time - John Roebling was the foremost bridge designer of his time and had built several other major suspension bridges ( company history ). He had earned a degree in civil engineering in Germany, at a time when there was no school in the United States offering engineering degrees (except in effect West Point)
- he had invented a way of making wire cables that made suspension bridges more economical and he also understood better than other engineers at the time how to make them safe
- the politics of funding the bridge were nasty
- work began on the bridge in Jan. 1870
- John Roebling died of tetanus during construction, his son Washington A. Roebling took up the work but was paralyzed by cassion disease (what scuba divers call the bends--the harmful effects of nitrogen bubbles in the body if you go from high to normal pressure air too quickly). Washington's wife Emily Warren Roebling became the construction supervisor and saw the bridge to completion. (more on casualties )
- the bridge made a connection that made possible a larger New York City (at the time it was built Brooklyn was a separate city--Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, the Bronx and Manhattan were consolidated into one city in 1898).
- some people were bothered by its bare utility, they thought of architecture on the basis of decoration
- but aesthetics were changing to celebrate utility--modern architecture wanted to get rid of all that old decoration and celebrate functional form
how do our romantic and other ideas about technology affect what technologies we like and what we don't like?
Diego Rivera at work on the Central Panel, North Wall, Detroit Institute of Arts
click here to see one of the finished Detroit murals
This page written and copyright Pamela E. Mack