Matthew E Edgar

“Technology/science,” “pure/applied,” “internal/external,” and “technical/ social” are some of the dichotomies that were foreign to the integrating inventors, engineers, and managers of the system- and network-building era. To”
― Wiebe E. Bijker, The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology

“The paradox, though, was already evident: that the more solidly the foundations of an English state were cemented together, so the harder did it become to present the island as a single realm. Seen in this light, Athelstan’s conquest of York, the feat which had first served to project the power of the West Saxon monarchy deep into the north of Britain, can be seen as the decisive event in the making of Scotland as well as of England. There”
― Tom Holland, Athelstan: The Making of England

“The term “pattern” is preferable to “model” because a pattern is a metaphor suggesting looseness and a tendency to become unraveled.”
― Wiebe E. Bijker, The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology

“Let me, then, define technology as a family of methods for associating and channeling other entities and forces, both human and nonhuman. It is a method, one method, for the conduct of heterogeneous engineering, for the construction of a relatively stable system of related bits and pieces with emergent properties in a hostile or indifferent environment. When I say this, I do not mean that the methods are somehow different from the forces that they channel. Technology does not act as a kind of traffic policeman that is distinct in nature from the traffic it directs. It”
― Wiebe E. Bijker, The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology