Technology and Culture

abstract:

There are three ways that technology may be woven into the pattern of history: as the basis for sustainability, for progress, and for crisis. Currently historians are exploring all three patterns. Their approaches relate in some degree to different audiences, which include not only other historians but also engineers, social scientists, policy makers, and the wider public. This essay focuses on the historical pattern of crisis, a concept that is currently evolving from the older idea of a sharply defined turning point to one of ongoing, ever-spreading centers of doom. Fear that history might become a series of technology-driven crises coexists with continuing enthusiasm about history as technology-driven progress. What needs more attention is the possibility of providing, through material and social means, a historical basis for sustainable security.