Historians of technology face a paradox. We see technology as a powerful agent of historical change and as an integral dimension of politics and economics, society and culture. Yet technology's daunting complexity and its astounding variety pose a risk of overwhelming our work. There is a fundamental tension between our desire to understand technology as knowledge and hardware and our desire to analyze its role as a mediator and medium of historical change. This tension has shaped surveys in our field in a way that makes the history of technology seem isolated and distinct from mainstream history, despite our belief that it is not. At the extreme are the encyclopedic surveys (like that of Charles Singer and his colleagues) which focus on the evolution of technology as hardware, with almost no attempt to explore links with broader patterns of historical change. For example, the Industrial Revolution remains invisible in the Singer volumes; the profound transformations it wrought are neither acknowledged nor addressed.
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