Technology Matters: Questions to Live With

October 10, 2006 By Tod Newcombe

Technology Matters: Questions to Live With

By David E. Nye

MIT Press

$27.95 hardcover

In Technology Matters, author David Nye, a professor of comparative American studies and history at Warwick University in the UK, tackles 10 central questions about our relationship with technology, integrating a half-century of ideas in the field. He asks: Can we define technology? Does technology shape us or vice versa? Are we using technology to destroy jobs or create new opportunities? Should the market choose our technologies? In all, he asks concise questions and provides expansive answers to each.

Nye writes with clarity as he tries to persuade us to ask the same kinds of questions about technology that we pose about politics and economics, and about the social and cultural impacts of technology.

Technology matters, writes Nye, because it is inseparable from humanity. People excel at using old tools to solve new problems, and at inventing new tools for more elegant solutions to old tasks. We use technology to shape our world, yet we think little about the choices we make. Technology Matters asks probing questions that make us stop to think more about our own lives and the choices we make.

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