While I’m on a New Yorker kick, there was another recent article, called “So What Else Is New?,” which I thought was completely fascinating. It’s mostly a review of The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900 by David Edgerton, though it touches on other books and ideas and that’s half the fun.

Like Steven Shapin, the writer of the article, we’re all surrounded by technology—actually many, many technologies. Most of them have been around so long, are such successful technologies, they don’t even strike us as technology any more. A few violent examples:

Technological palimpsests are everywhere; it’s the normal state of things. Darfurians are being slaughtered by Janjaweed militia mounted on horses and camels, while their Sudanese government sponsors chip in with helicopters and Antonov cargo planes retrofitted as bombers. September 11th was a technological pastiche of new and old technologies (Boeings and box cutters), as was the 2003 Iraq invasion (stealth fighters, cruise missiles, and laser-guided smart bombs for the “shock and awe,” and jury-rigged sandbags and scrap-metal armor for Army Humvees when the Pentagon failed to provide high-tech alternatives). The Iraqi insurgents have revived the use of chlorine gas as a terror agent, a technology pioneered by patriotic German chemists in the First World War, and Sadddam Hussein, whose aircraft dropped modern nerve-gas bombs on the Kurdish town of Halabja, was executed by hanging, a technology of judicial killing that goes back to the ancient Persian Empire.

Edgerton’s main thesis is that we tend to focus too much on the history of technology innovations, while the real story is how those technologies change our lives:

Learning how to make new technologies is one thing; learning how, as a society, to use them is another. …[D]uring the early years of the telephone, there was confusion about what codes should regulate faceless and socially clueless speech. The telephone operator, typically female, often had the responsibility of waking up the master of the house, and so joined the wife as a woman who could talk to the man in bed…. [It was] the firm opinion of the British postmaster general in 1895 that “the telephone could not, and never would be an advantage which could be enjoyed by the large mass of the people.” He was wrong, but understandably so. The story of how we came to terms with the new technology—how we adjusted to it, adapted to it, domesticated it, altered it to suit our purposes—didn’t come with the technical spec sheet. It never does. No instruction manual can explain how a technology will evolve, in use, together with the rhythm of our lives.

It’s probably too dry for most people, but I thought this article had a lot of really interesting ideas. Of course, I spend my life surrounded by computers, and musical instruments which are often computers in disguise, so I wind up thinking about technology a lot; on the other hand, probably most of you reading this have real lives….