Culture’s Engine
About This Book
William Gosling traces how people have lived through a series of technological upheavals across history. Each new technology gave rise to fresh forms of social organisation, and those arrangements in turn shaped when and how the next upheaval arrived. Using detailed historical examples, the book follows this back-and-forth exchange and considers how it has set the course and speed of cultural change over time. Gosling's central claim is that the technology available at any given moment is the chief force shaping the world, and that its influence reaches well beyond physical objects and infrastructure. On this view, technology that succeeds does more than meet a need. It determines the direction and tempo of cultural development as a whole. The book is an incisive and searching examination of this long-standing bond between technology and society. Readers should not expect a chronicle of inventions or a survey of scientific discovery. Instead, the book probes how technology and social forces act on one another to produce successive revolutions and the outcomes that follow from them.
ISBN: 9789811545917
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