Know-how Articles, Technological Information
Yet even for a latest English word ‘technology’ has come to embrace often conflicting meanings. First, I will offer a abstract of Eric Schatzberg’s important new opus Technology, which untangles and clarifies the history of ‘technology’ and its cognates as actors’ categories. So ‘technology’ entered the twentieth century as the science of the economic arts, a term of art for the German cameralists and a brand-like placeholder term in the United States. Yet in the end the German idea of Technik would have a lot larger 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 vital class covering the humanities of fabric production. It is the important source of data and concepts that make sense of a world in constant transformation. The WIRED conversation illuminates how expertise is altering every facet of our lives—from culture to enterprise, science to design. The breakthro