The Shock Of The Old: Technology and Global History since 1900 - Softcover

Edgerton, David

3.57

451 ratings by Goodreads

9781861973061: The Shock Of The Old: Technology and Global History since 1900

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1861973063 ISBN 13: 9781861973061

Publisher: Profile Books, 2008

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Standard histories of technology give tired accounts of the usual inventions, inventors, and dates, framing technology as the inevitable march of progress. They split history into ages - electrification, motorisation, and computerisation - and rarely ask whether anyone bothered to use these inventions at the time. Shock of the Old is not one of those histories.
Instead of asking when a technology came to be, David Edgerton asks when the average person started using it. He reveals that decades- and centuries-old technologies are often critical parts of modern achievements, and that old technologies can remain dominant long after they were supposedly superseded. Letters exist alongside emails and outlasted telegrams; we still make physical books and magazines despite the rise of the Internet - a belated rise considering that the technologies that made it possible was invented in 1965.
Shock of the Old forces us to reassess the significance of old inventions such as corrugated iron and sewing machines and rethink the relative importance we place on the invention of something new, its application, and its widespread adoption. It challenges the idea that we live in an era of ever increasing change and, interweaving political, economic and cultural history, teaches us to think critically about technology.

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Review:

So the new is old, and the old is new! Marvellous stuff, and absolutely spot-on. (Simon Jenkins)

he eviscerates our obsession with novelty... (Hugh Pearman The Sunday Times)

newfangled things are sexy, but how significant are they?...Edgerton provides a corrective by emphasising some of the overlooked technologies that affect the lives of many. (John Sparks Newsweek)

David Edgerton's The Shock of the Old is a book I can use. I can take it in two hands and bash it over the heads of every techno-nerd, computer geek and neophiliac futurologist I meet. (Simon Jenkins Guardian)

...iconoclastic and thought-provoking book...he makes a strong case that accords with what Virgil identified around 25BC as a definitive human characteristic. Our lives consist of semper cedentia retro: always going forwards backwards. (The Times)

It's rare for a book to make you see the world differently, but this alternative history does exactly that on almost every page. (Guardian)

Synopsis:

The first proper global account of the place of technology in twentieth century history, this brilliant, thought-provoking book will radically revise our understanding of the relationship between technology and society.This first ever history of technology casts aside the usual stories of inventions and focuses instead on what people actually use. It reassesses the relationship of technology and society, using unrecognised examples such as Spanish synthetic petrol, Japanese rickshaws, American gas chambers, Soviet tractors and Turkish battleships.We do not live in an era of ever increasing change, and the most important technologies of the twenty first century are often overlooked today. Drawing on political, economic and cultural history, "The Shock of the Old" dispels misplaced futurism and exemplifies a radical new way of looking at our world.

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