137: Richard Rhodes' The Making of the Atomic Bomb

Rhodes is a novelist, and The Making of the Atomic Bomb is, as most reviewers have noted, a readable, and at times engrossing, epic (or as Hacker calls it, an “Atomiad.”)  It traces the development of the atomic bomb from the early 1900s, when physicists were just beginning to suspect the existence of an atom (though he locates belief in the “atom” as “an invisible layer of eternal, elemental substance” in ancient Greeks Leucippus and Democritus) through Los Alamos and WWII, and on to the development and testing of the “Super” or hydrogen bomb in the 1950s.  Various reviewers put their own political slants on Rhodes’ thesis, but Broad, I think, captures it most fairly: since 1945, when the United States dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, science has for the first time become powerful enough to challenge the state.  Critically, unlike technological determinists, Rhodes sees that though atomic technology has changed the way politics is enacted, the relationship between politics and technology is a two-way street – which means, following Bohr, that a peaceful, unified, global system is just as possible in the Nuclear Age as the current system of warring states.

81: Paul Boyer's By the Bomb's Early Light

Paul Boyer's By the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age seeks to understand how the atomic bombs dropped on Japan in 1945 affected American culture, thought, and worldview in the first 5 years of the new "atomic age."  Accordingly, the book uses a wide range of contemporary articles, books, editorials, letters to editors, radio broadcasts, movies, popular music, opinion polls, and the personal papers of prominent political figures to reconstruct both the history of nuclear energy and the new atomic culture.  Boyer argues that the culture industry was able to channel multiple fears and reactions to the bomb immediately after the blast into an understanding that "the dread destroyer of 1945 had become the shield of the Republic" by 1950.

According to Boyer, reactions to the bomb followed a rough trajectory from multiple viewpoints to a single viewpoint in less than five years.  Right after Hiroshima, Boyer found multiple expressions of a "primal fear of extinction," which led to support for international control of atomic energy.  However, this movement failed because the atomic scientists and other proponents of atomic energy exploited widespread anxiety about a nuclear war between capitalist and communist states... which led not to international regulation but to anticommunist hysteria.  American attempts to quell the hysteria by searching for a silver lining in peaceful applications of nuclear energy also backfired as early as 1947, when writers began suspecting that nuclear energy's positive impact had been "badly oversold."  The strategy that ended up working was the one taken by the federal government and allied groups, which emphasized future peaceful applications of nuclear energy combined with arguments for the feasibility of nuclear civil defense and the need for supremacy in the arms race.

Boyer finds in this story the roots of 1980s nuclear policy.  I think it also provides a compelling cultural-technological explanation for the beginning of the Cold War, as well as a strangely anachronistic interpretation of post-war culture.  Perhaps the 1940s and 50s really were as top-down as the Culture Industry would have us believe?  After all, Boyer did get much of his cultural information from contemporary pop-culture stories...

69: Drew Gilpin Faust's This Republic of Suffering

In This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, Drew Gilpin Faust uses a wide variety of primary materials to understand the cultural implications of the Civil War.  Working from correspondence between soldiers and their families and friends; poetry and writings by Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Ambrose Bierce, and others; and the voices of the legions of relief workers, coffin manufacturers, government bureaucrats, and other support staff, Faust shows new processes of dying and killing, along with new ways of making sense of these processes, helped shift the nation from a relatively unstructured agrarian federation to a modern, centralized, bureaucratic, industrial state.

The Civil War produced some 620,000 dead, which made death not just one of many features of the war but the defining element of it.  The sheer mass of bodies, generated by the combination of old styles of warfare with new, technologically-enhanced ways of killing, created huge logistical issues.  Soldiers died in new and gruesome ways, which made identification difficult; but even if they didn't, there was still the problem of mitigating bodily decay while trying to identify thousands of bodies and return them to their families.  These new problems generated new social and technological systems: refrigerated coffins, new embalming practices, streamlined accounting methods, and new bureaucratic systems to oversee the sheer volume of bodies needing to be processed.  Dealing with death thus helped businesses and the nation develop more modern systems for mass production and distribution.

62: Henry Nash Smith's Virgin Land

Henry Nash Smith's Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth, is an American Studies classic.  In it, Smith both explains and justifies the American Studies myth-and-symbol method as the way to access and interpret American culture, and he applies this method to a study of the myth of the American West.  He argues that the difficulty of the myth of the American West, which is actually a subset of a larger agrarian tradition coming out of Jeffersonian democracy, is that it "accepted the paired but contradictory ideas of nature and civilization as a general principle of historical and social interpretation."  In other words, American culture comes out of an unresolved tension about what to do with the machine in the garden.

For Smith, myths and symbols are larger and smaller units of the same thing: "an intellectual construct that fuses concept and emotion into an image."  Further, these images are not just the world of a single mind; they are collective representations, symbols pointing to a particularly American worldview.  This worldview itself has a history, and analyzing its various incarnations in connection with their historical context helps us understand it.  In other words, myth and symbol is of necessity interdisciplinary, because it situates literary analysis within history.

56: Leo Marx' Machine in the Garden

Leo Marx' The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America is an American Studies classic.  Written in 1964, the book uses a myth-and-symbol strategy to examine the "pastoral ideal" as a "powerful metaphor of contradiction" between nature and technology/history.  Marx is also very keen to determine what, if anything, makes American culture exceptional.  After analyzing many, many canonical writers - Twain, Melville, Hawthorne, and Jefferson, but also Shakespeare (The Tempest), D.H. Lawrence, and others - he concludes that American culture is neither totally pastoral and nostalgic nor purely technological and Progress-driven, but a dialectical combination of the two, on a symbolic level.  Thus art, in the broad sense of human ingenuity, shapes the landscape.  And American culture, according to myth-and-symbol, can be accessed through art.

Marx also argues that symbolic landscapes are always part myth, part reality, and that Americans have a tendency to mix the two, which means that an interdisciplinary American Studies approach that merges history and literature is the perfect way to study American culture and American exceptionalism.  While he does stick to the canon, uses "we" uncritically in reference to American culture, and really does seem to think that literature can speak for all of America, his argument that the American landscape is both technologically and culturally constructed, and that it is at once pastoral and industrial, rings true in landscape studies today.  Further, he, like many other post-war Americans, is very much concerned with the apparent technological domination of the landscape, and he issues a veiled solution to this problem that plays on the double meaning of symbol as both artistic and political representation: "the machine's sudden entrance into the garden presents a problem that ultimately belongs not to art but to politics." Well then.  If anyone tries to argue that Leo Marx was pro-American exceptionalism, I might suggest they read his book more closely.

30: Kathy Peiss' Hope in a Jar

Some books on feminism and women's culture make me really psyched to be a lady.  Some make me feel like a grumpy old stick in the mud, grousing about too-short skirts and a lack of self-respect among the younger generation.  Unfortunately, Hope in a Jar belongs in the latter category.

I'm not trying to say that it's an unnecessary or uninteresting book - it's quite the opposite, actually.  Hope in a Jar is a history of the American cosmetics industry "from the bottom up," and Peiss takes pains to show how women and minorities actively participated in and shaped beauty culture and the cosmetics industry that grew out of it.  It's the first book to take this industry seriously by looking at it from this perspective; even better, Peiss is an American Studies scholar, so she does that thing where she tells you a lot about both her little slice of life and about its impact on American culture as a whole.  Accordingly, Elizabeth Arden, Madame C.J. Walker and Mary Kay, among others, are portrayed as both intimately connected to the all-female networks, grassroots marketing strategies, and white-focused beauty standards developed in Americas beauty culture and savvy businesswomen who brought fresh ideas into American business culture.  Therefore, after WWI, when the beauty business mushroomed (along with the rest of the economy) into a male-operated, mass-media behemoth, it was instrumental in bringing both female consumers and female businesswomen into the mass market, thus empowering women in the interwar economy.

Women were also empowered in those interwar years by the application of makeup itself.  Rather than succumb to sedate mass-market beauty prescriptions, women followed the lead of their favorite actresses and painted up; bobbed hair, short skirts, and rouged lips and cheeks defied authority and emphasized women's sex appeal.  How better to celebrate their new status as equals in the marketplace than by asserting their physical presence and personal autonomy?

Right.  Here's where my inner grump comes in: even if makeup can be seen as liberatory (which, hey, in the 1920s it probably was), it still focuses the attention on a woman's body, on appearances, on sexuality.  At the risk of sounding like a generation-late Andrea Dworkin or a watered-down Maureen Dowd, women are always already seen as sexualized bodies, so emphasizing those bodies isn't particularly subversive.  And anyway, the slide back from subversive subject to sexualized object is just too easy when both take the female body as their reference point.

But I digress.  That kind of feminism definitely had its place, and Peiss' book is good at exploring its empowering intersections with mainstream beauty culture.

27: William Cronon's Nature's Metropolis

In Nature's Metropolis, Bill Cronon shows that the rapid growth of Chicago in the 19th century - from a few thousand residents in 1837 to some 300,000 in 1871 - was directly connected to the massive environmental restructuring of the western half of the United States at that time.  Chicago grew so quickly because it was surrounded by the magical combination of ridiculously abundant natural resources (forests in the north, rich soil in the plains, fish in the rivers, and so on), a growing transportation network, a series of technological developments (railroads, refrigerated cars, grain elevators, mechanization of grain and meat processing, etc) that reduced both travel times and spoilage of goods, and a relatively unregulated capitalist economy.  Thus, businesspeople razed entire forests in the upper midwest for housing timber, then cleared the land and used it for farming and husbandry; shot all the bison on the great plains, quarantined the Native Americans on reservations, and fenced in the land to create an elaborate system of factory farming; and turned much of the midwest into corn and wheat farms.  Railroads carried animals and produce from the hinterlands to the centralized stockyards and grain elevators in Chicago, where it was processed and shipped east (or back west) as needed.  And Chicago, which had become the center of a vast agricultural production and distribution network, boomed overnight.  The city and the country had become inextricably linked.

This is truly a fascinating book, and so well-written that even the technological and economic processes by which massive wheat production eventually led to the creation of the stock exchange are interesting.  The only criticisms I've seen are that Cronon doesn't spend enough time looking at the cultural productions in 19th century Chicago - and yes, that's true, he spends much more time in the stockyards, the railyards, and the stock exchange than at the theatre.  But really, at over 600 pages already, I think the book is lovely the way it is.

26: Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media

Reviews of Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man seem to follow roughly the same format: a brief overview of McLuhan's life that characterizes him as a wacky, provincial English professor-turned-overnight-celebrity; a few vague references to his most famous dictums; and an extension of his work to today's media, with an insistence that despite the passage of time, McLuhan's work is still surprisingly fresh and new and relevant. 

Be that as it may (hey, I'm all for finding relevance, even if I don't have the need to call someone a prophet), McLuhan's language is as obtuse as it is lovely, which makes for hard slogging.  Since one of the things he's known for is his tendency to write in aphorisms, I think the easiest way to summarize him here is to write out the three that gave me the most trouble, plus a fourth that gives me faith in humanity.

"the medium is the message"

This is the phrase McLuhan is probably most famous for.  Because it is so short, it's also a hard one to wrap my head around, and McLuhan wasn't much for giving careful explanations. The "is" doesn't help, either, because it implies that the two things are equal - which is confusing because it implies a tautology.  The way that this makes sense to me is to think about the relationship between social media and communication forms: a tweet or a Facebook status update or a Tumblr post is radically different from a blog post both in length and content; with less space and a greater emphasis on visuals, whatever information you're trying to convey in these smaller, more networked formats gets compressed, transformed, digested.  It's less medium = message and more medium --> message.  And the most successful messages are those that are well-tailored to by synergistic with their medium.

"the content of any medium is always another medium"

Ok.  Thanks, McLuhan, for defining a word with itself.  He goes on to explain, however, in his chapter on radio, that "[t]he content of the press is literary statement, as the content of the book is speech, and the content of the movie is the novel.  So the effects of radio are quite independent of its programming."  In a way, media are like a hall of mirrors or like Baudrillard's simulacra, copies of copies of copies; or maybe, in a more subversive vein, like Judith Butler's processes of translation.  They are telescoping, reflecting and repeating one another like a big, coordinated multimedia ad campaign.  And because of the time-space compression of newer media (see the blog-to-Twitter progression), older media are kept alive, at least for a time, within newer media: books within e-books within blogs and so on.

 "the bad news sells the good news"

Ever wonder why the news is always bad?  It's because bad news draws the viewer in to gawk or recoil in horror at the spectacle, so that the good news - the advertisements that show you what you can buy to make the horror go away - can catch you at a vulnerable moment.  Thus, when McLuhan was writing, anyway, commercials and programming were combined into one big program, so that program flowed into ad flowed back into program.  The interesting thing is that because a series of commercials is really a set of fragmented, disconnected texts, programmers rely on viewers' brains to fill in the gaps and connect the fragments into a larger coherent narrative.  Luckily, our brains are trained - ideologically, repetitively - to look for common threads, and to see nothing strange about a seamless integration of real life news, entertainment, and injunctions to consume.

Although "the medium is the message" seems to argue that content follows form, the telescoping nature of media seems to ensure that we stay on a technologically-mediated level playing field of reflected images, and the media themselves seem capable of sheer manipulation, I don't think that McLuhan was necessarily a technological determinist.  I say this because of his discussion of bicycles:

"It was no accident that the Wright Brothers were bicycle mechanics, or that early airplanes seemed in some ways like bicycles.  The transformations of technology have the character of organic evolution because all technologies are extensions of our physical being."

Technologies may condition the way humans communicate, but human beings are still very much a part of the technological system; technological change is still "organic evolution" because technologies are "extensions of our physical being" and therefore humans, not technologies, control the direction and rate and quality of technological change.  To folks who fear that the culture industry is going to take over the world and we'll wake up one day and find ourselves in the middle of Idiocracy, McLuhan argues that humans have the power to stop that kind of development from happening.  Which, if you think about it, was a necessary, albeit old school, message for Cold War America, presented in an interestingly old-fashioned print media-turned-celebrity package.

25: Jeff Meikle's American Plastic

Jeff Meikle's American Plastic delves into the history, technology, and business of plastic (in the US) to show that plastic is both material and metaphor for American culture.  On the one hand, plastic's seemingly infinite malleability can lead to creative freedom and human domination over nature; on the other, its synthetic, chemical artificiality detaches us from the natural world and thus leads, somehow, to death.  Lest this dichotomy seem too simple, he situates his history of plastic within Thomas Hughes' "technological momentum" framework, which holds that when technologies are young, they are easily manipulated by society; as they (and their attendant industries and systems of distribution) age, they shift from the manipulated to the manipulators.  Thus, if plastic was all "whatever" in the late 1800s, by the late 20th century, plastic had become a necessary, if silently lurking, element in our everyday lives.

The majority of the book focuses on technological manufacturing processes, the development of the plastics industry, and changing cultural perceptions of plastic (which were often, especially in DuPont's case, carefully crafted by ad execs).  The part that I found most interesting was Meikle's discussion of the relationship between plastics and streamlining in the 1930s, as it captures an industry, a technology, a culture and an aesthetic all in transition at once.

Although Bakelite, the first synthetic plastic, had been around since the turn of the century, it didn't take off until the 1920s, when its promoters were able to recast it as a material of innovation rather than one of simulation.  This reframing of plastic as something wholly man-made - and the reframing of "man-made" as a positive quality - was reflected in Bakelite's new emphasis on modern design, which took advantage of plastic's plasticity to create shapes and textures that could not be held by natural materials.  Inspired by Bakelite, other plastics manufacturers followed suit and developed radios, furniture, bowls, and other household goods with sleek, smooth surfaces and simple, sweeping curves.  Meikle is careful to point out that this streamlining trend was NOT a direct result of the plastic manufacturing process, which involved pouring softened plastic into molds.  Instead, he argues that the 1930s were a moment of flux, when culture and technology were on relatively equal footing: 1930s design resulted partly from consumer demand for 'machine-age forms' and partly from the high cost of machining plastic molds, which pushed manufacturers to develop simpler, more streamlined forms.  In other words, plastic and streamlining came together as a "happy coincidence."  Plastic sure did look good in curvilinear forms, though.  More importantly, the visual disconnect between the new streamlined plastics and natural materials and forms, which now looked irregular and staid by comparison, appealed to Americans' utopian aspirations while also giving plastic its identity.


After WWII and into the 1960s, plastic stopped being the utopian super material and started to seem emblematic of everything that was wrong with American society: cookie cutter homes filled with identical vinyl floors, naugahyde furniture, and Tupperware, social isolation, inequality and environmental destruction.  Meikle doesn't suggest that plastics directly caused the countercultural revolution - his analysis is far too nuanced to do that - but he does tie the proliferation of plastic to an ongoing tension between human creativity and the sense that American culture is increasingly detached from "the resistant stuff of nature."  Considering that a little under a century ago we were celebrating the domination of nature via plastic, this tension reveals a now-mature technological system's imbalance of power between humans and nature.  Meikle calls the tension "insoluble;" I've never considered myself much of an environmentalist, but I do hope he's wrong. 

23: Edwin Layton's Revolt of the Engineers

Revolt of the Engineers lives in the depths of library storage, which is unfortunate because it's a rather interesting study of a failed social movement among early 20th-century engineers.  Also, it was written in 1971, and the political and ideological struggles of that era seem clearly to have influenced Layton's thinking.  And maybe it's just me, but I find reading about a social movement from one era through the eyes of another to be rather illuminating.

Layton argues that professionalization and progressive organizing efforts among engineers in the early 20th century may not have led to large, lasting social change either within the profession or in American society, but the engineers' efforts were still an important cross-pollination between technology and culture.

To support this claim, Layton traces a chronological history of the rise and fall of different professional engineering organizations and their relationship to the broader social reform movement in turn-of-the-century America.  One of his more entertaining examples is the career of Henry Gantt, whose appropriately-named Gantt charts are still in use today, at least among my undergrad Civil Engineering students.

Henry Gantt was a talented follower of Frederick Taylor, the guy who devised all those time and motion studies to make Ford's assembly lines faster and more efficient.  (Harry Bravermann and Tim Cresswell both do cool - and very different - treatments of Taylor and his impact.)  Like Taylor, Gantt thought scientific management was the best thing ever, and he developed his Gantt chart as a visual project management tool to help users maintain top-down scientific control over an entire process.  Also like Taylor, Gantt thought that scientific management principles could and should be applied in areas beyond the confines of business, especially government and education.  But Gantt, who liked to carefully chart out arms production and ship production processes in his office during WWI, went a step further.  With the right visualization tools (heh) and a firm commitment to scientific management principles, Gantt thought that engineers could potentially plan not just individual industries but the whole economy, from defense production, education, and government to automobile manufacturing, city development, and social services.  And because scientific management efficiently allocated resources and talent, letting the engineers run society would be perfectly efficiently and perfectly just.  Democracy and scientific management would finally become synonymous!

Now, the problem with this scheme, as Layton points out, is that it's not a democracy but a technocracy, where the engineers in their central planning offices get to design sociotechnical systems, but all citizens can do is conform to them.  Incidentally, this kind of thinking also plagued engineering's professional societies, where infighting over power and prestige kept engineers from making any serious progress toward social goals.  Layton concludes here, with the decline of a movement that could have had a huge impact on society, particularly during the Great Depression. 

Yet I think that if self-serving politics hindered engineers from effecting large-scale social reform or a mass seizure of political power, they helped them spread scientific management ideas in more conservative arenas like business, and manufacturing in particular.  Here, stripped of its revolutionary potential, scientific management could be used to further exploit the labor of assembly-line and sweatshop workers by speeding the pace of production and thus lowering per-unit labor costs.  Layton doesn't dwell on this particular legacy, but his frustration with his subjects' deflation of their movement is clear.  The implications for the time in which he was writing seem pretty clear, too.

22: Hugh Aitken's Syntony and Spark

Syntony and Spark is nominally a history of the development of radio technology to 1914, and Hugh Aitken does a thorough job of tracing this technological trajectory from its origins in a set of mathematical equations (Maxwell's electromagnetic field) to a burgeoning communications industry at the eve of WWI.  But it is also a case study for a theory about the relationship between science, technology, and the economy.  The development of the radio is interesting, but I think Aitken's theoretical framework is even more so.

Aitken was writing in the 1970s, when the history of technology was still lost somewhere in the gulf between history and technological development and trying to find its sea-legs.  Scholars knew that they wanted to look carefully and critically at the relationship between technology and culture, but there were few models, and even fewer people had offered good, solid frameworks for studying the connection.  This book, according to John Staudenmaier and Emily Thompson, anyway, was one of the ones that made it.

Aitken's goal was to figure out a relationship between science, technology, and the economy, and he did so empirically, by tracing the development of spark radiotelegraphy.  His theory has three major components.

First, having traced the technology from its origins in Maxwell's theorems, to Hertz's and Lodge's experimental proof, to Lodge's and Marconi's development of viable commercial products and systems, Aitken argues that the process of transmission appears to be linear, from science (Maxwell) to technology (Hertz & Lodge) to business (Lodge and Marconi).

However, science, technology, and the economy are all vastly different spheres with their own norms, processes, methods of inquiry and creative potential.  Science is concerned with slowly and methodically enlarging human knowledge; technology is concerned with designing solutions to real-world problems, and the economy is concerned with generating profit by meeting consumer demand.  Each sphere thus speaks a different language, fosters a different set of skills, considers different things to be important, and considers different kinds of acts to be creative.  Thus, second, science might be generating one kind of knowledge, but it doesn't exactly have all of human knowledge and creativity in a headlock.  Rather, the three spheres are interdependent loci of creativity.

And third, this interdependence leads to a feedback look between the three spheres.  Science may uncover principles that technology can then build out into something the economy can use, but it goes the other way, too.  The economy can generate demand for certain technologies and fund certain kinds of research over others; and technology can empirically derive things that science finds useful, like Lodge's measuring instruments or Marconi's discovery that radio waves bend around the earth.

While Aitken's method could use more attention to social groups (instead of just "the economy" as a source of demand) and less attention to individual men who seemed to drive the pace of technological and scientific change all by their lonesomes, his theory still seems relevant today, and not just for radios.  The examples that immediately come to mind are iPhones and DNA mapping, both of which seem (to me at least) to be borne of tightly-knit webs of scientific, engineering, and business interests.

20: John Staudenmaier's Technology's Storytellers

Technology's Storytellers is an analysis of 20 years' worth of articles from Technology and Culture, the main journal for historians of technology.  It is also, despite this limited scope, an articulation of a new way if thinking about the relationship between technology and culture, which Staudenmaier calls the "constituency model."

Staudenmaier's taxonomies of the articles are interesting, especially insofar as this book is basically a big long bibliography essay for an emerging field of study.  But his constituency model is probably more interesting, so I'll focus on that here.

The constituency model is based on (his dissertation director) Thomas Hughes' theory of technological momentum, which argues (basically) that when technologies are new, they are very malleable and thus very responsive to cultural conditions, but as they age, they become harder to change, and thus they are more likely to shape culture than to be shaped by it.

Staudenmaier adds to this theory in a couple of ways.  First, he divides the aging of technology into three phases and assigns a constituency to each:

•  the design stage + design constituency: the attitudes of the inventors, the economic and ideological climate when (and where) the design is taking place, potential users, potential workers, and available technologies all help shape the technology
• the momentum stage + maintenance constituency: as a technology matures and becomes more rigid/ harder to change, it's easier to change culture to fit the technology than to try to change the technology, so new social patterns start to emerge
• the senility stage: a technology, which is an artifact of the particular time and place of its creation and early life, finally becomes outmoded because the world around it has changed so much.  Sometimes the technology gets redesigned; more often, the technology's boosters try to realign culture with the technology and fail.
• the impact constituency: these are the people who lose because of a technology, or those who suffer from the rigidities and limitations in the technology.

Like Hughes, Staudenmaier is interested in broadening the study of technology from histories of the development of the object itself to explorations of the relationship between a technology and its particular historical moment.  More than Hughes, however, he has a radical agenda of uncovering and giving voice to those people who are adversely affected by technologies, form the Lakota Sioux whom Staudenmaier taught after college to the people in third world countries who are forced into sweatshop labor.  He also argues that historians of technology should not be afraid of Marx.

While a study of a single journal's articles is more a study of editorial preferences than field-wide trends, Staudenmaier's theoretical intervention is rather useful, especially in a globalized economy where the Western faith in technological progress is now pretty much everywhere.  I'm a big fan of finding ways to give voice to the oppressed and questioning the drive to solve all the world's problems with ever more technological solutions.

19: Joy Parr's Sensing Changes

Sensing Changes is a study of five Canadian communities affected by mid-century megaprojects and a sixth community affected by water contamination in the early 2000s.  Joy Parr's more pressing concern, however, is not the communities themselves but the "embodied history" they represent.  Therefore, the book does detail the aftermath of human and environmental displacement, but it does so mostly so that its author can advocate a paradigm shift in the way we do history.

Parr proposes embodied history, or a historical approach that seeks to recover historical information from all five senses, because she is frustrated with the linguistic turn in the humanities.  Per Parr, a linguistic approach requires her to view her subjects through the lens of culturally-constructed discourse, and it privileges those bodily senses most easily repeatable and describable: sight and hearing.  By contrast, Parr thinks knowledge resides in individual experience, not in some amorphous thing called culture, and she thinks that all five senses, not just sight and hearing (the most communicable ones) need to be brought into historical discussions, so that we can truly understand what it was like to live in a certain place at a particular time.  She wants to give voice to the oppressed, and she thinks that focusing on individual bodily experience will help her do it.

Parr pursues this logic through all of her case studies, but the one that I found particularly interesting is the case of the village of Iroquois, a small 19th-century mill town that was moved in its entirety in 1958 to make way for the St. Lawrence Seaway.  Although the residents of the town first tried to fight the relocation and then tried to convince the Canadian government to at least let them plan their new town, their pleas fell on deaf ears.  "Hydro" was moving small towns all along the new waterway, and they had a cookie-cutter model city already planned out for Iroquois, complete with mid-century suburban bungalows, curved streets and even a strip mall. 

Thus, those buildings that could be moved, were; the rest were burned and then scattered so as not to create a threat to navigation, and the residents were moved 1.6km north to their new village.  In her narration of this process, Parr focuses not on the logistics of moving the village or on epic battles between residents and Hydro, but on the impact of the move on the bodies of the people who lived there.  Using interviews with Iroquois residents, she describes how it felt to replace a thriving, walkable commercial district with empty parking lots and strip malls; how it felt to go from fishing generations-old fishing spots to seeking out new fishing holes in a now artificial body of water; and what it was like to go from a walking community where neighbors saw each other daily to a driving community where they rarely saw them at all. 

And then she talks about the trees.  In old Iroquois, huge maples, some a meter in diameter, lined most of the streets and provided shade in the summer and wind protection in the winter.  Some were thousands of years old.  The village also had a large apple orchard along the river, with four different varieties of apples and summer employment for the residents.  When the village had to see their old homes and businesses burned and razed, that was traumatic enough; but when they had to see their trees burned and razed - well, the trees were so integral to their sense of place that they cried to see them cut down.  And then when new Iroquois was built without trees, they were disoriented: old people couldn't find their homes, mothers had to make sure their children wore sunblock, and no one wanted to go outside in the winter because they now lived in a barren, windswept plain.  One older man predicted that he would never see trees again, and he was right - the saplings the villagers planted in the new town had barely taken root when he died.

A lot of this book feels pretty hippy-dippy to me, and I do think Parr's analysis would greatly benefit from a more balanced approach to the history of the megaprojects - maybe incorporating top-down history of project development to complement the embodied history, maybe trusting her sources to be something other than traumatized, sensing bodies.  But that said, I like that her method gives voice to and validates the villagers' loss of place.  It advocates a more community-based style of placemaking; it also restores some of the power to create history to the people who live it.

18: Emily Thompson's The Soundscape of Modernity

Emily Thompson calls The Soundscape of Modernity "a history of aural culture in early twentieth-century America," and lest you wonder (as I did) what on earth aural culture is and why anyone should care about it, she spends the book carefully reconstructing both the new kinds of sounds that came out of processes of modernization AND the new ways of listening that were shaped by those sounds.  The result, she argues, is a more finely-textured understanding of what it was like to live in the US at the turn of the century and thus a greater understanding of how technological change and culture interact. 

Thompson uses a wide range of sound- and listening-related cultural and spatial forms, from orchestra halls to acoustic tiles to jazz to noise abatement commissions, to argue that modernity brought new sounds and thus new ways of listening.  The examples that truly got me, however, were the acoustically-engineered spaces that bookend her narrative: Boston's Symphony Hall, completed in 1900, and New York's Radio City Music Hall, completed in 1932.  These two buildings came out of radically different understandings of both sound and listening, and they thus show just how far acoustics had come in just 30 years.


When Symphony Hall was being built, the architects wanted an auditorium that could compete with the greatest halls in Europe, so they hired a Harvard physicist, Wallace Sabine, to figure out a way to predict the acoustical quality of rooms.  Sabine proceeded empirically: he asked the conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra where the best halls were (Vienna and Paris, I think), then went to those halls, inventoried all of the surfaces in them (plaster, cushions, glass, wood, etc), and performed a series of reverberation tests where he blew into an organ pipe and counted the seconds until he couldn't hear the sound anymore.  Using these data, he derived absorption constants for materials commonly found in rooms, and with these he developed a formula that related expected reverberation to the total surface area of materials in the room.  And from here, he was able to help the architects design a room that sounded as much like the great European halls as possible: live, rich, reverberent, and just as much an instrument as those in the orchestra.


Built roughly 30 years later, Radio City Music Hall was an entirely different beast.  In the intervening decades, acoustical engineers had developed three new technologies: microphones, loudspeakers, and construction materials that severely restricted reverberation; auditoriums now had substantially less "noise," and listeners had come to prefer clear, efficient, electroacoustically-produced sound over live unmediated sound.  In fact, rooms were now so dead and loudspeakers/mics so imperative that Sabine's formula was no longer precise enough to predict the acoustics of rooms.  Thus, Radio City Music Hall was designed not with Sabine's plaster/glass/wood-based formula, but with Carl Eyring's new synthetic space/synthetic sound-based one.  And it worked: if people sitting at the very back of the 6500-seat auditorium could barely make out performers on stage, the hall's vast system of loudspeakers ensured that they heard their voices just fine.  It was a new kind of auditorium for a new mass audience.

In other words, as what people listened to changed from live musical productions (and other organic sounds, like dogs barking, policemen whistling, people talking, etc) to synthetic re-productions via loudspeakers (and other non-organic sounds, like trains, cars, construction equipment, etc), they came to expect and prefer the mechanical over the natural, the clean re-production over the acoustical messiness of the live show.

I might argue that the cause and effect in this process were a bit different, but otherwise her argument has a strong resonance today: how many times have you gone to see a band... and come away thinking that well, that was all right, but they sounded better on their recording?

 

11: Anthony Wallace's Rockdale

Rockdale: The Growth of an American Village in the Early Industrial Revolution is a long and winding 485-page "microhistory" of the Rockdale Manufacturing district in the first half of the 19th century.

Or, as Anthony Wallace summarizes it: "An account of the coming of the machines, the making of a new way of life in the mill hamlets, the triumph of evangelical capitalists over socialists and infidels, and the transformation of the workers into Christian soldiers in a cotton-manufacturing district in Pennsylvania in the years before and during the Civil War."  Does it get any better than that?  (On reading that, I started wondering if this book were somehow a reprint of something from the 1800s, but no, it was published in 1978, and as far as I can tell Wallace is still alive and kicking.)

The point of this book, I think, is to use the history of Rockdale to test his theory of "paradigmatic processes of cultural change," which he published as a separate journal article in 1972.  Basically, this theory expands on the ideas of a gentleman named Thomas Kuhn, who argued that scientific research alternates between periods of normal and revolutionary science.  In "normal" science, students are taught the dominant scientific paradigm in schools, where they replicate the experiments and learn the formulas that support the paradigm, and then, in their professional lives, they discover new applications of the same paradigm.  Revolutionary science happens when the sheer number of problems not addressed by normal science becomes so big that scientists have to devise a new paradigm; they start developing new ways to solve old problems instead of using old ways to solve new problems.

Wallace expands Kuhn's theory from two phases to five: innovation, paradigmatic core development, exploitation, functional consequences, and rationalization.  He also argues that scientists hum along happily doing research in their secret science communities (innovating and occasionally changing their research paradigm) until someone from the real world realizes that a scientist has devised a solution to their real world problem - at which point the exploitation, functional consequences, and rationalization phases come into play, because the innovation has made the leap from abstract research to real-world application.

I don't like his argument that scientists and regular people are in two separate worlds (er, scientists go to the grocery store just like the rest of us).  Also, I'm honestly not entirely sure how this whole paradigmatic cultural change thing applies to Rockdale.  But the application of a theoretical model of cultural change, especially that one, is by far the least interesting part of the book.  Wallace is an anthropologist who is fascinated by the everyday lives of real people.  He also, as it turns out, is one hell of a researcher: the book is chock full of old love letters, chatty notes between the wives and daughters of the manufacturers, rent account books, pay ledgers, census data, household accounting data, workers' letters, newspaper articles, and lots and lots of technical information about the mechanics of cotton mills - all woven together so skillfully that you can almost smell the cotton and oil and sweat and hear the grinding of the machinery and feel the old stone tenements the workers lived in.

One of the most interesting parts, I think, is his discussion of the internal workings of the cotton mills themselves, from the water-driven "power train" that uses a system of geared shafts and belts to transfer the power from the water to the various machines, to the flow of cotton from one machine - and one worker - to the next.  The cotton mills in Rockdale were built in the 1820s and 1830s, so they were basically smaller versions of English mills, filled with English spinning equipment and - at least at first - managed by English technicians and English mill managers.  Cotton came in 300-350lb bales that were first cleaned, then carded, then throstled (pre-spun, or converted into roving) and then spun on massive spinning mules - all, as it turns out, by real people who lived in particular houses (usually with 5 or 6 other people) and who made specific wages (anywhere from $4 to $50 a month), and the majority of whom, under Wallace's care, now have their names recorded for posterity.  Truthfully, what the book lacks in theory it more than makes up for in its remarkable ability to bring Rockdale to life.

10: Claude Fischer's America Calling

 
America Calling is a social history of the telephone in America from 1900 to 1940, and it's an impressive piece of work.  Fischer is a well-funded sociologist - which means that in addition to liking big structural arguments, clearly-defined terms, and general conclusions drawn from massive amounts of data, he also had an army of research assistants to help him with this project.  And really, why do just one study when you have enough people to research and write five?  Yes, five. 

Fischer embarked on this project to answer three questions about the relationship between the telephone and American culture.  First, who subscribed to residential telephone service, where did they live, and why did they get phones?  Second, how did the collective use of the telephone affect social structure and culture?  And third, what personal meanings did phones have for subscribers?

To answer these questions (again, because he had an army of assistants), he undertook the following studies:

1. A historical study of how the telephone industry marketed phones to North American households, with particular attention to rural and working-class customers
2. A statistical analysis of national diffusion patterns for telephone subscriptions over time to see where in the country people were likely to have phones, and whether phone subscriptions varied with class and rural vs local households
3. Community studies in three communities in the San Francisco Bay area (Antioch, Palo Alto, and San Rafael), which included social histories for each town, statistical analyses of phone diffusion, and statistical analyses of social change
4. Statistical analyses, also at the community level, of relationships between telephone subscriptions and a variety of indicators, like occupation, presence and number of adult women in the household, and distance from the city center
5. Oral histories with 35 elderly people living in the three towns

He also situated this study within technology studies, which means that he was interested in the question of power and agency in the human-technological relationship.  Therefore, he looked at both how industry and government constrained people's use and adoption of telephones AND how consumers adopted the technology and used it for their own purposes.

And the result?  After a lot of number crunching, Fischer determined several things, but two of his conclusions regarding social and cultural change particularly stand out (to me).  First, rather than functioning primarily as a tool for business or as a replacement for human contact (as promoters intended and detractors feared), the telephone quickly became a "technology of sociability."  Americans (especially women) discovered that telephones made organizing events and coordinating people much more efficient - and so they coordinated more events and thus raised their overall level of in-person socializing.  Instead of replacing personal interaction, the telephone amplified it and thus contributed to the overall accelerated pace of modern life.

But the telephone wasn't all modern, all the time.  Rather than operating as a tool of modernity by destroying local places and helping people connect with strangers in foreign lands (as telephone promoters initially claimed), the telephone was actually anti-modern; it helped people form closer bonds with people they already knew.  It thus helped people create a bunch of small, insular, place-bound parochial cultures instead of contributing to the growing mass culture

Both of these conclusions are really fascinating because they show that people used telephones to help them adjust to the upheavals of modernization, and that they were happy to do more things as long as they had the support and close contact of a small group of friends.  The strange thing about all of this is that Fischer insists that the telephone didn't change American culture in any significant way (when it obviously did.)  I'm hoping he just means that people used it to satisfy existing needs rather than to create new ones.

4: David Gartman's Auto Opium

This book took a while, mostly because I'm a sucker for Marxist histories of the auto industry.  Something about reading Marxist language makes me feel like I'm cracking a secret code (exciting!)  Also they usually tie up their narratives so neatly, like the end of a Dickens novel (comforting!).  Yes, I'm a huge nerdo.  Anyway.

Gartman argues that automobiles are the opiate of the masses.  He's not saying that we're all fools for being tricked into buying cars and staking our identities on them - that's for the bike activists to claim.  Instead, he's saying that people who claim cars as a part of their identity are effectively taking a happy pill: they're focusing on the pleasure they get from owning, driving, maintaining - consuming - a car to distract themselves from their crappy, dissatisfying jobs.

The process by which people's identity gets shifted from work to car consumption goes something like this.  Back at the turn of the (last) century, as Ford's assembly-line style manufacturing increased the pace of work and parsed it into smaller and smaller pieces, workers became detached from the final product, and eventually work stopped being the thing that workers staked their identity on.  But when they revolted against this deskilling, Ford was wise: he raised their pay to $5 a day.  Apparently workers were psyched - they could feed their families!  Buy houses!  Buy Model T's!  Go to movies!  And they stopped complaining about their crappy jobs, because they were being paid well, and being paid well meant they could buy all the things they'd always wanted but couldn't afford.

They bought cars, which made Ford happy, because more people buying cars meant that he could produce more cars and make more money.

The thing was, the cars the working people could afford in the teens and twenties didn't look anything like the cars that rich people drove; they looked like they were cobbled together by a bunch of different people (84, to be exact) from a bunch of disparate parts into a big rectangular box - which, of course, they were.  Luxury cars, on the other hand, were still made using craft production, which meant that each car was assembled, fitted, and tuned by a single mechanic.  They were aesthetically pleasing, with organic lines that made them look like a unified whole.

As it turns out, people who spend all day doing menial tasks at an assembly line don't want to drive around in something that reminds them of how much they hate work when they're not at work.  Hence, when Alfred Sloan at GM started styling mass-produced cars to have the streamlining and unified design of luxury cars, working people were SUPER psyched.  Finally, they wouldn't have to drive around in some rattletrap that stank of assembly line, and, even better, someone might mistake them for a richer person than they really were.  Genius!

Sloan and his stylists were geniuses in other ways, too, namely in the invention of planned obsolescence and product hierarchies, both of which were designed to encourage consumers to buy newer or better or more cars than they needed.

The whole styling thing worked to increase consumption of cars because, according to Gartman, people who have dead-end, menial, unproductive, bureaucratic, or otherwise dispiriting jobs increasingly seek the personal satisfaction, pleasure, and self-worth they should be getting at work in the objects they consume.  And they know that buying things isn't going to make them happy like good productive labor would, but they do it anyway, to ease the pain.  Hence opiate.

It stopped working in the 60s, when people started to catch on that they were working ever harder in ever more degrading work conditions so that they could buy increasingly expensive cars that weren't actually making them happy. So they revolted, both economically and culturally, and at the end of the 1960s, Fordism was dead.  Unfortunately, consuming to fill a void was not. 

I'm too tired to add much in the way of analysis right now, but I will say that I suspect that the many car enthusiasts in my life do get a lot of pleasure from working on, shopping for, and driving their cars, and that for all I know their cars may well fill a need that jobs don't.  However, I've never thought of them as building cars that represent "'freedom from the superfluous adjuncts of styling-for-obsolescence'" or working on "humanizing the alienated products of capitalist mass production." Oh, Marxists.

the museum of endangered sounds

They have Gameboy music, the Nokia ringtone, and dot matrix printers.  I'm sold.

http://savethesounds.info/

the unabomber as a radical philosopher of technology?

David Skrbina and Ted Kaczynski have been corresponding since 2003, and they have a lot in common - intellectually, I mean.  Both come from educational backgrounds in mathematics; both have since turned from math to philosophy; and both are fascinated by the relationship between technology and society. Skrbina has also written a good bit on panpsychism, a philosophy which sees 'mind' in all things and which he relates to eco-philosophy, so it's not entirely unsurprising that in 2010 Feral House published a collection of Kaczynski's writings as Technological Slavery: The Collected Writings of Theodore J. Kaczynski, a.k.a. "The Unabomber," with a supportive introduction from Skrbina.  Like Skrbina, Kaczynski develops a critique of technological society from a perspective of mind/ psychology rather than from more (academically) conventional dialectical or social constructivist approaches; also like Skrbina, he questions the levels of dependence on technology in 'advanced' societies.

Lewis Mumford - The City in History

 Mumford is such a lovely writer, and it's easy to think that what he lacks in primary research he more than makes up for in thought-provoking speculation.  He's a utopian thinker who advocates a balance between humans and their environment in the form of decentered, thoughtful, federated social structures. He also writes a lot about the relationship between space and technology.  This book is a ginormous grand narrative of "the city" in Western civilization, from the very dawn of time to the present, so here are just a few of my notes:

In an era shaped by white flight, deindustrialization/ suburbanization, not to mention the fear of nuclear war, Mumford calls for a return to city building instead of destruction.  He argues that cities serve two main purposes: religion and the state.  Biology is a (distant?) third, though really cities are for the people, so people should come first.  The shrine and the citadel are its two dominant structures, carried over from villages.  The city exists to nurture human biological and cultural reproduction, not to use technology to tame whole populations into submission.  The city is the stand-in for society, and he is very adamant that spatial forms and social forms interconnect.  Also, space and the built environment are articulated with technology; humans shouldn’t be afraid of their own inventions or let a few wackos use technology to control them.  The city should be humanity, magnified; communality, nurturing, love.  I sense Hardt & Negri here, where a surplus of love and community lead to a radical democracy, and also the dread fear of totalitarianism and technology, which apparently went hand-in-hand in WWII, what with the Nazis and all.