Paul Atkinson, Reaktion

摘要

This is a gem of a book. Atkinson, a reader in design at Sheffield Hallam University, has written a highly readable yet authoritative survey of computing history and its connections to the larger cultural forces that often invisibly guide how technology emerges from and propagates through a society. Atkinson sees these forces and, more specifically, the cultural products of these forces, as shaping the behaviours not only of the users but also of the designers, incorporating both 'user' and 'maker' into a framework that seeks an alternative to a simplistic 'impact' model of the user or the relentless incrementalism of Moore's Law, which forms the epistemic substrate of the modern computer maker.1