Technology and Culture

This book is not really about computers or engineers. Rather, it is about how humans fashion their identities, their “selves,” through the technology they use. It is also about how the dominant image of technology as separate and distinct from humanity “hides experiences that blur the boundary between humans and machines” (p. xi). Downey explores these issues by studying the history and usage of computer-aided design and manufacturing technologies (CAD/CAM).

Gary Lee Downey is a cultural anthropologist, mechanical engineer, and director of the Center for Science and Technology Studies at Virginia Tech. In this book Downey fleshes out a theoretical approach he has written about more succinctly elsewhere by adding material about the history of the CAD/CAM industry, amusing and insightful observations about industry trade shows, sharp criticism of the national rhetoric of productivity in the United States in the 1980s, and extended excerpts from his interviews with CAD/CAM natives and initiates. The core of his research emanates from his ethnographic “field work” in the CAD/CAM lab at Virginia Tech and from various interviews with CAD/CAM users in industry.

Downey seems to be writing to two audiences: general readers and science, technology, and society program insiders. To general readers he keeps selling the idea that technology is not an external positive force in society. Most readers of this journal are well aware of this and do not need to be reminded of it quite so often. To STS insiders Downey argues that the time for passive, disinterested study has lapsed and it is time to intervene in contemporary society to help change the dominant image of technology.

According to Downey, the dominant image of technology draws a sharp boundary between humans and machines and works hand-in-hand with the concept of productivity—the “accountant’s whip” (p. 74)—to portray technology as a tool for maximizing profits and humans as replaceable units in an ever more efficient system of production. Downey shows that the relationship between humans and machines is more complex than this [End Page 120] image allows and attempts to make visible the fuzzy edges of that relationship. He succeeds in showing that the boundary is pierced in both directions: “I am in the machine” and “the machine is in me.” That is, humans leave behind “many different configurations of agency” (p. 150) in any given technology, such as the program code in CAD/CAM software that both constrains and enables users in specific ways long after the original programmer has left the project. Working in the other direction, Downey extends the concept of agency to include “acts of positioning in society” (pp. 31, 239) and shows through interviews, observations, and personal experience how individual human identities are formed in part by their relationship to specific technologies. In this sense the machine is in me, in my identity, my social position, my psyche.

Downey does not offer any new research tools or methods for historians, but this book makes an important contribution to the larger project of theorizing the relationship between technology and society. Whereas Thomas Hughes, Wiebe Bijker, and others have looked at the larger macro relationships that compose technological systems and sociotechnical ensembles, Downey inverts the lens and looks at the patterns of intimate, individual relationships between users and CAD/CAM technology. In this way Downey prods readers to rethink the cultural boundary between technology and humanity and focuses much-needed attention on the dynamics of technology-in-use.

In the final chapter Downey pursues his goal of changing the public view of technology by imagining a world in which the dominant image of technology includes humans and machines in linked networks of agency. Rather than replacing human workers, this new image would encourage engineers “to piece together configurations of human and machine agencies in desirable ways” for all concerned (p. 241). Miraculously, in Downey’s vision the drive to maximize profits...