Untitled - socium.ge

434 Rosalind Williamsdoes it mean to identify a stage of history with a stage of technology? I willbegin by commenting on the ways in which historians try to connect the pastwith the present, and vice versa, and then will reflect on the introduction of theconcept of “technology” to accomplish such connections. This leads to adiscussion of the way the concept of “technology” entered the study of history,beginning in the seventeenth century, leading to a new understanding (in theeighteenth century) of history as the record of progress. The chapter willconclude with a consideration of the ways in which technological activitieshave altered the conditions of human existence and therefore of history.CONNECTING PAST AND PRESENTThe major contribution so far of historians of technology to the current discussionof “network society” may be summarized in two words: context matters.In Castells’s somewhat longer formulation: “Studies on the uses of informationand communication technologies demonstrate, again, what historians oftechnology established long since: that technology can only yield its promisein the framework of cultural, organizational, and institutional transformations”(pp. 41–2).In order to demonstrate how context matters, historians of technology haveconcentrated on case studies that show the “social construction of technology,”both in design and in use, in a particular context of material, political, andeconomic constraints and actors (individual, institutional, and networked).Many of these studies are models of fine-grained archival research presented ina nuanced and sophisticated analysis. For all their virtues, however, contextualstudies may promote an untenable distinction between a technological core anda social environment, when a deeper understanding of “context matters”demonstrates that social relationships are embedded in technological relationshipsand vice versa. Case studies of social construction tend to focus attentionon contemporary (to the study) players and issues rather than on ones deeper inthe past. Such types of case study beg the question of how the actors and forcesthat are the agents of “social construction” have themselves been shaped bytechnological forces and events, as is inevitably the case in a reflexive world.Historians of technology need to make the transition from “contextmatters” to “history matters.” We need to deploy case studies to develophigher-order generalizations about history and technology, and to explain toourselves and to our readers the relevance of history to the present. Most historianswant their work to have some degree of generalizability and relevance,but historians of technology seem to want this more than most. The drive togeneralize is strong because the question of the relationship between technologicaland historical change is one of the deep problems of historical theory: