Technology News
Yet even for a recent English word ‘technology ’ has come to embrace usually conflicting meanings. First, I will offer a summary of Eric Schatzberg’s important new opus Technology, which untangles and clarifies the history of ‘technology’ and its cognates as actors’ classes. So ‘technology’ entered the 20 th century as the science of the commercial arts, a time period of artwork for the German cameralists and a brand-like placeholder time period within the United States. Yet in the end the German idea of Technik would have much higher influence. After 1850 German engineers embraced the time period Technik in a broad sense, not restricted to a means-to-ends rationality but a coherent and culturally important class overlaying the arts of fabric production. But the result was, as Leo Marx recognized, a ‘semantic void’, ‘the lack of sufficient language to seize the dramatic modifications in the materials culture of the era’. My final contention is that serious about scale provides a met