In the current issue

Conference Report
Yoel Bergman, "Thirty-Eighth Symposium of the International Committee for the History of Technology"

Essay Reviews
Simon A. Cole, "The Faces of Biometrics: Lisa S. Nelson, America Identified; Kelly A. Gates, Our Biometric Future"

Orit Halpern, "Affective Machines: Elizabeth A. Wilson: Affect and Artificial Intelligence"

Philip Mirowski, "Minding the Cybernetic Gap: Andrew Pickering, The Cybernetic Brain"

Megan Mullen, "Demystifying Some Momentous Changes: Richard R. John, Network Nation"

Casey O'Donnell, "On the Back of a Flying Gryphon: Soaring
Over/Through the Global Game Industry: Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter, Games of Empire; Bonnie A. Nardi, My Life as a Night Elf Priest; William Sims Bainbridge, The Warcraft Civilization"

Technology and Culture
October 2011

In the Current Issue

Conference Report:
Thirty-Eighth Symposium of the International Committee for the History of Technology

Yoel Bergman
ICOHTEC's thirty-eighth conference was hosted for the first time in Scotland, in the city of Glasgow, on the impressive premises of the University of Glasgow. Participants explored "Consumer Choice and Technology" in various ways, including consumer-driven innovations, gender and consumption, marketing and culture of consumption, power and producer–consumer relationships, technology and the household, museum consumers, technology's past monuments, and consumption of information technologies, food, and health. [more]

The Face of Biometrics:
Lisa S. Nelson, America Identified
Kelly A. Gates, Our Biometric Future

Simon A. Cole
Biometric-identification technologies—technologies that use bodily attributes to identify individuals for surveillance, social control, commerce, and other purposes—are becoming increasingly pervasive in everyday life in post-9/11 society. Not surprisingly, these developments have sparked increased scholarly interest, and a number of new books about biometric technologies have appeared recently. [more]

Affective Machines:
Elizabeth A. Wilson,
Affect and Artificial Intelligence

Orit Halpern
Elizabeth A. Wilson's new book Affect and Artificial Intelligence brings the computational and psychoanalytic together to produce a stage upon which to make visible the many different possibilities lying latent in our relationship to, imagination of, and desire for intelligent machines. Wilson demonstrates with elegance in argument and prose that our understanding of what constitutes an artificial intelligence and a machine is deeply inflected by fantasy, performance, and emotion. [more]

Minding the Cybernetic Gap:
Andrew Pickering, The Cybernetic Brain

Philip Mirowski
At the end of this volume Andrew Pickering admits that "this book is an attempt to rescue cybernetics from the margins and launder it into mainstream discourse" (p. 390). I run into this sort of rescue operation all the time in the history of economics, and have indulged in it a little bit myself, so it becomes all the more urgent for me to try and articulate why it is unlikely to work here as there. This feels imperative, because I share so many of Pickering's enthusiasms: pragmatism and Continental philosophy, the physics of self-organization and cellular automata, the aversion to treating mathematics as mere representation, dissatisfaction with conventional histories of science, and a fascination with cybernetics. [more]

Demystifying Some Momentous Changes:
Richard R. John, Network Nation

Megan Mullen
How do we know when a communication technology has been fully integrated into society? Perhaps it is when most people no longer think about, or even remember, the debates surrounding its adoption. But we can only imagine the times when older technologies—those we now take for granted or those we have discarded—were having their practices and protocols negotiated. The telephone and telegraph are two such technologies. ? [more]

On the Back of a Flying Gryphon: Soaring Over/ Through the Global Game Industry:
Nick Dyer-Witheford & Greig de Peuter,
Games of Empire
Bonnie A. Nardi, My Life as a Night Elf Priest
William Sims Bainbridge, The Warcraft Civilization

Casey O'Donnell
After more than thirty years as a thing that can be called "an industry," the video-game industry now finds itself in its middle ages, as well as the object of critical and scholarly inquiry. The global game industry and the virtual game worlds it creates are sprawling, historically situated, socio-technical assemblages that continue to offer promise and peril to researchers. Too often, however, context and the link between game worlds and developer worlds go uninterrogated. Research tends to focus exclusively on content or on production, with a few notable exceptions linking the two. [more]