Technology and Culture

At the Start1 MELVIN KRANZBERG· I “ Fragmentation! ” was the offhand critical judgment of a distinguished historian when he first heard of the formation of the Society for the History of Technology. Like most scholars, he rightly deplores the modern tendency to “ learn more and more about less and less,” and he was delighted when he realized that the nature of our subject matter requires an “ interlacing ” of disciplines rather than a further “ fragmentation ” of knowledge. Indeed, the development of technology and its relations with society and culture are such broad subjects that our new Society and its publication must be interdisciplinary in scope. We are con­ cerned not only with the history of technological devices and processes, but also with the relations of technology to science, politics, social change, economics, and the arts and humanities. For the first time an effort is being made to bring together the engineer, the scientist, the industrialist, the social scientist, and the humanist to promote the study and interpretation of developments which are of mutual interest and concern. The title of our publication, Technology and Culture, was not lightly chosen. It reveals the breadth of our definition of culture and indicates our awareness of the complex and intricate interrela­ tionships of all aspects of technology. We use “ culture ” in the broad anthropological sense defined by Edward B. Tylor almost a century ago: “ Culture is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, laws, custom, and any other capa­ bilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.” Technology itself is one of the most distinctive and significant of * Dr. Kranzberg, Professor of History at Case Institute of Technology, was chairman of the committee which organized the Society for the History of Technology. I 2 Melvin Kranzberg man’s capabilities, and it is essential that we learn how it developed in order to analyze its relations with the other elements of culture. The interdisciplinary nature of our subject matter inevitably dictates the form and scope of our journal. It accounts also for our audience. We intend to appeal to the engineer, to the social scientist, to the scientist, to the humanist—to the academic scholar as well as to the intelligent layman—for our subject is of importance to all these. The engineer should realize that his professional activities impinge upon all elements of our culture—that a bridge or telephone fulfills economic and social needs and possesses esthetic and cultural values as well as technological elements. Similarly, the social scientists and the humanists should be aware of techno­ logical influences on society and the individual, but they cannot understand these influences unless they have some knowledge of how technical devices came into being and how they function. Anyone who is at all interested in understanding the past, in learning how the present got to be the way it is, or in speculating about the future—and this would include every thinking manmust be concerned with the development of technology and its relation with society and culture. The justification, then, for our Society and for this publication is our subject matter: technology. There is little point in belabor­ ing the obvious importance of technology: the use of tools, to­ gether with the development of moral sensibility—and the inter­ relation between changing moralities and changing technologies is by no means clear—has enabled man to advance from an ape-like creature through the Stone and Bronze Ages eventually into an industrial society whose objects we see all around us and which conditions our daily lives. Furthermore, our hopes and fears for the future of mankind are largely bound up with technology. II Despite this tremendous and acknowledged significance of tech­ nology, it is curious that in twentieth century United States, one of the most technologically minded of all nations in history, there has been no organized group nor scholarly periodical specifically devoted to the study of technology as a human activity and of its relation to other concerns. How can we account for this neglect? It has its roots deep in At the Start 3 the past, and we can trace it as far back as Plato’s distinction between brain and...