Some Thoughts on the Question "How Do New Things Happen?"

Abstract

Some Thoughts on the Question "How Do New Things Happen?" Susan J. Douglas (bio) First of all, I am deeply honored and incredibly humbled to be given this extraordinary honor. I have been coming to SHOT meetings on and off for 32 years—and it shows—and I never, ever dreamed that I would receive an award bestowed on the likes of Tom Hughes, Carroll Pursell, Hugh Aitken, Roe Smith, Ruth Schwartz Cowan, David Nye, David Hounshell, and so many other amazing scholars. And I'll say my thank yous at the banquet, but I do want to note that I would not be here without the exemplary guidance and support of Hunter Dupree, Pat Malone, and Hugh Aitken. Now, when the chair of the da Vinci committee calls you with the extraordinary news, you also learn very quickly that you must sing for your supper. So here goes. How do new things happen? This was the deceptively simple question Hugh Aitken asked when laying out what we do in our field. It also implies, of course, the question "How do new things not happen?" But the question—How do new things happen?—opens up everything—the role of inventors, scientists, engineers, businesses, corporations, the state, regulations, and, of course, users and consumers—in shaping the emergence and uses of technologies. So today I offer one possibly idiosyncratic view of how we have thought about this question over time, and what our approaches have meant. As you know, my main work in the field has been on communications technologies, and particularly on radio. The trends and debates I want to reflect on today are the rise of social constructivism, my own oscillations around technological determinism, insurgent uses of technologies by everyday people, technology and gender, and what I've come to see as the irony of technology. [End Page 293] When I began studying the history of technology as a young scholar back in the 1970s, the field was in the process of overthrowing the "Eureka" school of invention—you know, the dime novel, movie version in which the lone, heroic inventor, hunched over in his lab, suddenly has an instantaneous, blazing insight and invents the lightbulb or the telephone. There was also a move to overthrow the "whig history" of technology, as laid out by John Staudenmaier, in which there was some ineluctable, teleological move toward the ever-better; the interrogation of the myth of progress. Instead, scholars began to emphasize the evolutionary and collaborative nature of invention, the importance of failures and false starts, and, following the work of Tom Hughes, Hunter Dupree, the entire team at the Edison Papers, and others, began focusing on technological systems as opposed to singular devices. The full-bore attack on internalist history was on. Also in the crosshairs? Technological determinism. In my own area, media studies, Marshall McLuhan, following the lead of Harold Innes, wrote an entire book, Understanding Media, based on hard-core technological determinism in which each medium, and the properties that inhered in it, revolutionized the world. In his classic 1967 article "Do Machines Make History?" Robert Heilbroner argued for a soft determinism in which machines did not make history entirely on their own but did powerfully shape—and were shaped by—the socioeconomic and political systems of which they were part, bringing forth particular forms of labor and ways to organize that labor and, indeed, everyday life. What about people? Did they have no agency here? As Elting Morison showed in his seminal work, Men, Machines and Modern Times, people did resist what seemed like technological progress, sometimes vehemently. So here was the contradictory brew that surrounded us in the 1970s. There was the rediscovery of Marxism, with its emphasis on the importance of studying power, and also on resurrecting the importance of working-class culture and history. Thus there was also the new social history with its bottom-up emphasis on families, workers, immigrants, women, and African Americans. There was the new notion of culture as "a whole way of life," as Raymond Williams put it, ripping the concept away from its elite perch as referring only to the arts, literature, and other forms of high...

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