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Technology Matters: Questions to Live With
Discusses in nontechnical language ten central questions about technology that illuminate what technology is and why it matters. Technology matters, writes David Nye, because it is inseparable from being human. We have used tools for more than 100,000 years, and their central purpose has not always been to provide necessities. People excel at using old tools to solve new problems and at inventing new tools for more elegant solutions to old tasks. Perhaps this is because we are intimate with devices and machines from an early age—as children, we play with technological trucks, cars, stoves, telephones, model railroads, Playstations. Through these machines we imagine ourselves into a creative relationship with the world. As adults, we retain this technological playfulness with gadgets and appliances—Blackberries, cell phones, GPS navigation systems in our cars. We use technology to shape our world, yet we think little about the choices we are making. In Technology Matters , Nye tackles ten central questions about our relationship to technology, integrating a half-century of ideas about technology into ten cogent and concise chapters, with wide-ranging historical examples from many societies. He Can we define technology? Does technology shape us, or do we shape it? Is technology inevitable or unpredictable? (Why do experts often fail to get it right?)? How do historians understand it? Are we using modern technology to create cultural uniformity, or diversity? To create abundance, or an ecological crisis? To destroy jobs or create new opportunities? Should "the market" choose our technologies? Do advanced technologies make us more secure, or escalate dangers? Does ubiquitous technology expand our mental horizons, or encapsulate us in artifice? These large questions may have no final answers yet, but we need to wrestle with them—to live them, so that we may, as Rilke puts it, "live along some distant day into the answers."
282 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 2006
12 people are currently reading
138 people want to read
About the author
David E. Nye
31 books7 followersDavid E. Nye is Professor of American History at the University of Southern Denmark. The winner of the 2005 Leonardo da Vinci Medal of the Society for the History of Technology, he is the author of Image Worlds: Corporate Identities at General Electric, 1890-1930 (1985), Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology, 1880-1940 (1990), American Technological Sublime (1994), Consuming Power: A Social History of American Energies (1997), America as Second Creation: Technology and Narratives of New Beginnings (2003), and Technology Matters: Questions to Live With (2006) published by the MIT Press.
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
November 27, 2021
A a philosophical way of approaching technological progress.
I really liked the way the author defines and differentiates innovations and inventions.
I really liked the way the author defines and differentiates innovations and inventions.
June 4, 2025
Some insightful and interesting analysis of technology and history. I liked each essay not for their original ideas, but rather for the overview of other people’s ideas from history. It provides a good starting point to then become familiar with other authors and then branch off into their work. One criticism: The very last essay was a boring summary of the whole book - I don’t recommend it.
January 6, 2025
I hate this book off principle (love the theory) or at least I think I do BECAUSE I CAN'T READ IT ANYWHERE AND I NEED IT FOR MY ESSAY PLEASE I BEG RELEASE A PDF PLEASE. I MADE A GOODREADS ACCOUNT JUST TO LEAVE THIS REVIEW.
July 16, 2019
A touch biased in parts. A philosophical stream of consciousness that made me think of things that weren't technology.
In all pretty O.K.
In all pretty O.K.
November 17, 2022
Read this for school. I was good and thought provoking. I little dry but that to be expected
February 12, 2025
class reading for SuperCiv! v cool book, made me realize how pervasive and all-encompassing technology follows us throughout history, acting as a mirror of us.
May 15, 2013
Technology is part of our life and even if people try to scape of it will follow them. Let’s pretend a person goes to wood to live from nature and scape from the technological society we are involved in. As soon as that person takes a stick and sharpens one end to be able to hunt, or to create a hole in the ground to plant some crops, or even if he just use the stick to pick a fruit from a tall tree he is already using some type technology. There is no argue that there are some technologies that are more primitive than other but at the end every society from the beginning of humanity has used some type of technology. Even when we were nomads human had tools to hunt down animals. We can argue that technology is part of humanity as the need for eating and sleeping is. How technology comes to be, and can we live without it?
In the book Technology Matters: Questions to live with, David Nye brings important issues of the relationship between the development of technology and the evolution of the human. His book is form by 10 chapters where each chapter brings a new question. Nye responds each question providing a historical survey with multiple examples from various societies.
Technology is part of us and the main reason for its creation is to make our life easier. People have thought for long time that new advances of technology will make human useless. New technology just changes the way we operate but doesn’t makes us useless. Unemployment doesn’t occur because of development of new technology; employments shift and technology just might improve the productivity of some people. New business occurs because of technology and is the job of humans to come with the new way of operation. Maybe 200 years ago we might have had 20 people planting corn but now we have 2 people planting corn and 100 people coding some application, new jobs that occurred because of the development of new technology. In the US in May of 1975 the unemployment rate was of 9% and in May 2009 was of 9.5%.[i] In those 34 years there has been significant change in technology but not much change on the percentage of unemployment, so do people lose their job because of technology?
One point he makes clear through the book is that technology cannot be predictable and that society changes the technology and not the other way around. He mentions multiple examples where a technology was created for one purpose but other usages were given after. He also points out other ways on how technology, originally created with a good purpose, has created negative impact on our world and how some societies have denied some technology. He mentions how asbestos was used to prevent fire but how it killed many of the workers who installed it. To prove that society shapes technology he mentions the example of the gunpowder that was created in China but it was the Europeans that used it to produce fire weapons. Going back to the refusal of technology by a society he also mentions how the Japanese Samurais refused to use guns even though they knew that it was more powerful and lethal than using a sword or an arrow, also in a more modern environment the Amish in the US still prohibit the usage of farm machinery for agriculture inside their community.
On one of the chapter Nye talks about technology and safety. During the cold war the ownership of nuclear weapons didn’t make anyone feel safe, people lived in fear of being attack with weapons of mass destructions. Some can argue that that was then, we don’t feel like that anymore and nuclear weapons still exist and now more countries have then than during the Cold War. Others can argue that technology might bring us some type of safety and the installation of surveillance system in business and houses prove that technology makes us feel safe. Is it technology or is it society that make us feel or not feel safe. Recently 2 Mexicans twitted that a school in Veracruz (a city that has lots of violence) was taken over by gunmen. These twits made concerned parents go and pick up their children from school, more than 26 accidents occurred and after the crash those concerned parents left their cars in the middle of the road and ran to the schools just to make sure that their kids were alright[ii]. At the end the twits were lies, but can you blame the fear of the parents on the technology or on the society they are living in?
In conclusion how technology comes to develop and what impact it causes on us are the main theme of Nye’s book. He makes a strong argument that technology is not deterministic and we cannot predict it, we cannot even predict the full usage of it when we initially create it, mentioning that invention is the mother of necessity. At the end technology shapes and is shaped by us and our culture, and brings infinite possibilities to our lives.
In the book Technology Matters: Questions to live with, David Nye brings important issues of the relationship between the development of technology and the evolution of the human. His book is form by 10 chapters where each chapter brings a new question. Nye responds each question providing a historical survey with multiple examples from various societies.
Technology is part of us and the main reason for its creation is to make our life easier. People have thought for long time that new advances of technology will make human useless. New technology just changes the way we operate but doesn’t makes us useless. Unemployment doesn’t occur because of development of new technology; employments shift and technology just might improve the productivity of some people. New business occurs because of technology and is the job of humans to come with the new way of operation. Maybe 200 years ago we might have had 20 people planting corn but now we have 2 people planting corn and 100 people coding some application, new jobs that occurred because of the development of new technology. In the US in May of 1975 the unemployment rate was of 9% and in May 2009 was of 9.5%.[i] In those 34 years there has been significant change in technology but not much change on the percentage of unemployment, so do people lose their job because of technology?
One point he makes clear through the book is that technology cannot be predictable and that society changes the technology and not the other way around. He mentions multiple examples where a technology was created for one purpose but other usages were given after. He also points out other ways on how technology, originally created with a good purpose, has created negative impact on our world and how some societies have denied some technology. He mentions how asbestos was used to prevent fire but how it killed many of the workers who installed it. To prove that society shapes technology he mentions the example of the gunpowder that was created in China but it was the Europeans that used it to produce fire weapons. Going back to the refusal of technology by a society he also mentions how the Japanese Samurais refused to use guns even though they knew that it was more powerful and lethal than using a sword or an arrow, also in a more modern environment the Amish in the US still prohibit the usage of farm machinery for agriculture inside their community.
On one of the chapter Nye talks about technology and safety. During the cold war the ownership of nuclear weapons didn’t make anyone feel safe, people lived in fear of being attack with weapons of mass destructions. Some can argue that that was then, we don’t feel like that anymore and nuclear weapons still exist and now more countries have then than during the Cold War. Others can argue that technology might bring us some type of safety and the installation of surveillance system in business and houses prove that technology makes us feel safe. Is it technology or is it society that make us feel or not feel safe. Recently 2 Mexicans twitted that a school in Veracruz (a city that has lots of violence) was taken over by gunmen. These twits made concerned parents go and pick up their children from school, more than 26 accidents occurred and after the crash those concerned parents left their cars in the middle of the road and ran to the schools just to make sure that their kids were alright[ii]. At the end the twits were lies, but can you blame the fear of the parents on the technology or on the society they are living in?
In conclusion how technology comes to develop and what impact it causes on us are the main theme of Nye’s book. He makes a strong argument that technology is not deterministic and we cannot predict it, we cannot even predict the full usage of it when we initially create it, mentioning that invention is the mother of necessity. At the end technology shapes and is shaped by us and our culture, and brings infinite possibilities to our lives.
October 18, 2010
Nye, David, Technology Matters; Questions to Live With; MIT Press, Cambridge Mass. 2006
David Nye poses ten essential questions in his book Technology Matters. Drawing on history, economics, political science, and sociology, Nye provides the reader with an analysis, not only of how different types of technologies have impacted society, but an analysis of the word itself. Nye deftly demonstrates how the word “technology”, encompasses more than a computer and computer applications (although it does not seem so in some schools). Nye’s primary focus in addressing the ten essential questions is the emphasis on “technological determinism”, or the idea that societal values and norms are driven by a specific society’s level of technology.
Through a discussion of Economics and market systems, including a discussion of Karl Marx and his views on industrialization, the author begins to explore the core factors behind the development of technologies within society. For example, Nye submits that, “The central purpose of technologies has not been to provide necessities, such as food and shelter, for humans achieved these goals very early in their existence. Rather, technologies have been used for social evolution.” “Technology,” Jose Ortega y Gasset argued, “is the production of superfluities” This particular passage summarizes a major point of the book and also a point which can easily translate into the educational environment. In short, technology refines existing resources and theories that we have mastered and seek to improve. For instance; the newspaper project becomes the radio show, which becomes the video project, which, in turn, becomes a podcast.
Although Technology Matters does not directly deal with emerging internet technologies; the underlying message of the book, the sociological implications of the use of technology, is one that needs to be addressed when discussing any of the emerging technologies that are studied. As educators and parents struggle to keep up with the exponential growth of social technologies (It seems that Moore’s Law described more than memory), the need to understand the far reaching implications of the broad based use of these technologies becomes increasingly important. Nye neither damns nor extols any individual technology, and the thoughtful questions that form the backbone of this book can be applied to educational technology as educators argue the potential benefits and detriments of the use of technology in the classroom, primarily in the area of ethical use.
Although this book is primarily historical in nature, its use in a course dealing with the implementation of technology should not be discounted. The well informed commentary that is provided within the book provides a thoughtful backdrop to the subject of emerging technologies; the questions contained in the book allow for reflection as these technologies are deployed inside the classroom. The books humanistic perspective provides a frame in which the sterile aspects of network resources and administrative concerns can be discussed. I would rate this book as an excellent resource and would highly endorse its use as a supplemental reading in technology courses and as a “wish list” book for anyone interested in investigating the past and potential cultural impact of technology within society.
David Nye poses ten essential questions in his book Technology Matters. Drawing on history, economics, political science, and sociology, Nye provides the reader with an analysis, not only of how different types of technologies have impacted society, but an analysis of the word itself. Nye deftly demonstrates how the word “technology”, encompasses more than a computer and computer applications (although it does not seem so in some schools). Nye’s primary focus in addressing the ten essential questions is the emphasis on “technological determinism”, or the idea that societal values and norms are driven by a specific society’s level of technology.
Through a discussion of Economics and market systems, including a discussion of Karl Marx and his views on industrialization, the author begins to explore the core factors behind the development of technologies within society. For example, Nye submits that, “The central purpose of technologies has not been to provide necessities, such as food and shelter, for humans achieved these goals very early in their existence. Rather, technologies have been used for social evolution.” “Technology,” Jose Ortega y Gasset argued, “is the production of superfluities” This particular passage summarizes a major point of the book and also a point which can easily translate into the educational environment. In short, technology refines existing resources and theories that we have mastered and seek to improve. For instance; the newspaper project becomes the radio show, which becomes the video project, which, in turn, becomes a podcast.
Although Technology Matters does not directly deal with emerging internet technologies; the underlying message of the book, the sociological implications of the use of technology, is one that needs to be addressed when discussing any of the emerging technologies that are studied. As educators and parents struggle to keep up with the exponential growth of social technologies (It seems that Moore’s Law described more than memory), the need to understand the far reaching implications of the broad based use of these technologies becomes increasingly important. Nye neither damns nor extols any individual technology, and the thoughtful questions that form the backbone of this book can be applied to educational technology as educators argue the potential benefits and detriments of the use of technology in the classroom, primarily in the area of ethical use.
Although this book is primarily historical in nature, its use in a course dealing with the implementation of technology should not be discounted. The well informed commentary that is provided within the book provides a thoughtful backdrop to the subject of emerging technologies; the questions contained in the book allow for reflection as these technologies are deployed inside the classroom. The books humanistic perspective provides a frame in which the sterile aspects of network resources and administrative concerns can be discussed. I would rate this book as an excellent resource and would highly endorse its use as a supplemental reading in technology courses and as a “wish list” book for anyone interested in investigating the past and potential cultural impact of technology within society.
May 10, 2011
This is a great introductory text to some of the major questions/issues relating to the use of technology in the 21st century. Written in an accessible manner, Nye makes the case against technological determinism, and, instead, taps into a growing trend to regard technology as fundamentally ambivalent. As such, Nye presents a fascinating arrays of stories about technological development that illustrate the tremendous benefits, burdens, and surprises of technology. Without being intimidating, Nye strikes a good balance between arguing a particular position on key issues while leaving explorations of some issues and questions more open ended. Though the text is intended to be a broader overview of various issues in the study and use of technology, Nye is good about providing a rich supply of citations that will leave readers with a wealth of future reading.
June 12, 2011
There's nothing earth-shattering in this historical review. Nonetheless, it provides a cogent survey of historical scholarship regarding technology and makes a compelling case for why determinism is wrong, but also how technology and its effects might be productively studied in other ways. It looks at various arenas of life that technology touches and covers the vast changes across time. As someone who has been reading far more academic takes on many of these issues for years, there was nothing entirely new to me. But, I was thrilled to find a text that not only referenced all sorts of great seminal and historical thinkers (both academic and fictional), but also seemed like it could be read and understood at the undergraduate-level. I hope I have the chance to teach a course in which I can assign this, and would heartily recommend others do the same.
September 7, 2012
Great introduction to the history of technology - concepts such as technological determinism and momentum, etc - although the middle third is weak. He tends to overreach in the chapters on environmentalism, globalization and culture, as he relies more heavily on popular sources (novels, movies) in these chapters than in the first third of the book, which is much more historiographical. Finally, his argument for increased individual agency in decision making regarding the adaptation of particular technologies in a given society seems incompatible with his analysis of technological momentum.
October 19, 2012
If you just want a shallow understanding of technology it works. However, the perspective is too westernized.
He applies examples rather than theories, which diminishes the attractiveness of the book.
He applies examples rather than theories, which diminishes the attractiveness of the book.
October 21, 2008
This book explains the many complex interactions between technology, the economy, and society.
Want to read
June 1, 2009Technology Matters: Questions to Live With by David E. Nye (2007)
September 30, 2011
The writing was a bit convoluted sometimes, and the narrative wasn't as clear as it could have been. Also, the material he referenced could have been a bit more explicit.
July 17, 2023
technological determinism: out
bicycles: in
bicycles: in
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews