New Books in Technology

We tend to take for granted that much of the innovation in the technology that we use today, in particular the communication technology, is made possible because of standards. In his book Open Standards and the Digital Age: History, Ideology, and Networks (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Dr. Andrew L. Russell examines standards and the standardization process in technology with an emphasis on standards in information networks. In particular, Russell examines the interdisciplinary historical foundations of openness and open standards by exploring the movement toward standardization in engineering, as well as the communication industry. Paying careful attention to the politics of standardization, Russell’s book considers the ideological foundations of openness, as well as the rhetoric surrounding this ideology. Notable also is the consideration of standardization as a critique of previous ideology and a rejection of centralized control. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Just as there is no one way to write a biography, nor should there be, so there is no rule dictating that biography must be about the life of a person. In recent years, the jettisoning of this tradition has led to a number of compelling explorations of the lives of commodities (such as salt or the banana), texts (Gone with the Wind, for example), diseases (including cancer or cancer cells), and even the Atlantic Ocean. The latest entry into this realm of biographical inquiry is Robert Neer‘s Napalm: An American Biography (Harvard University Press, 2013). As the title suggests, this is a consciously American biography, meaning that Neer (a core lecturer at Columbia University) traces the arc of the life of the incendiary gel whilst also situating it in a national context. Napalm is, after all, an American invention and, as Neer writes in the prologue, “It’s history illuminates America’s story, from victory in World War II, through defeat in Vietnam, to its current position in a globalizing world.” Much as napalm sticks to everything it encounters, so it sticks to our national history, splattering into the lives of those involved in its creation, the victims of its use, and the way America- to this day- wages war. *To briefly highlight another emerging biographical trend, many authors are now posting their research online so that it is easily accessible to readers. Thus, the endnotes of Napalm: An American Biography, including relevant hyperlinks, can be accessed HERE. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Thomas Bey William Bailey is the author of Unofficial Release: Self-Released and Handmade Audio in Post-Industrial Society (Belsona Books, 2012). He is a psycho-acoustic sound artist and writer on saturation culture. Thomas traces the history of self-released audio from its origins in mail-art networks of the 1970s to the present day practice of using antiquated media – the humble cassette tape – for the dissemination of experimental sounds. Net-labels, mp3 blogs, tape traders, and their many casts of characters are examined along the way as changing technologies impact the strategies for resilience among self-releasing audio artists. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

What if there was an instruction manual for television? Not just for the casual consumer, but for college students interested in learning about the culture of television, written by some of the field’s top scholars? In How to Watch Television (New York University Press, 2013), editors Ethan Thompson and Jason Mittell have put together a collection of 40 original essays from some of today’s top scholars on television culture. Each essay focuses on a single television show, and each is an example of how to practice media criticism on an academic level. Thompson, Associate Professor at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, and Mittell, professor at Middlebury College, also contributed essays to the collection. As the authors explain: “This book, the essays inside it, and the critical methods the authors employ, all seek to expand the ways you think about television.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

How does conducting fieldwork on another planet, using a robot as a mobile laboratory, change what it means to be a scientist? In Working on Mars: Voyages of Scientific Discovery with the Mars Exploration Rovers (MIT Press, 2012), William J. Clancey explores the nature of exploration in the context of the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) missions of the first decade of the twenty-first century. From 2002-2005 (and with additional interviews thereafter), Clancey led a group of computer and social scientists who acted as participant observers of the MER science team. The resulting book is a fascinating study of the scientists and engineers on the team, their living and working conditions, the relationship of their project to other exploratory and laboratory contexts in the history of science, and the implications of their work for current and future interplanetary missions. Working on Mars beautifully uses rich ethnographic fieldwork to open up larger conceptual issues for the field of science studies, while never losing sight of the aesthetic, personal, and professional lives of MER scientists as individuals. Readers will learn about what it’s like to live on local Mars time, how virtuality is crucial to the experience of MER scientists and engineers, what it means for a scientific team to share a robotic laboratory-body, and why understanding and communicating the poetics of this research may be crucial to realizing the goals of space exploration in the future. It is a wonderful, rich, and sensitively-wrought account. Working on Mars was recently awarded the Gardner-Lasser Aerospace History Literature Award by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Congratulations, Bill! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

We tend to understand the modernization of Japan as a story of its rise as a techno-superpower. In East Asia: Technology, Ideology, and Empire in Japan’s Wartime Era, 1931-1945 (Stanford University Press, 2013), Aaron Stephen Moore critiques this account in a study of the relationship between technology and power in the context of Japanese fascism and imperialism. Moore traces the emergence of a “technological imaginary” in wartime Japan, exploring how different groups (including intellectuals, technology bureaucrats, engineers, and state planners) invested the term “technology” with ideological meaning and power in the course of discussing and shaping national policy. Paying careful attention to the ways that technological and colonial development co-produced and challenged each other, Moore’s story respects the archives of both text and practice: the book deeply cuts into into the intellectual history of technology in the context of Japanese empire, while also following the activities, material difficulties, and large-scale products of many thousands of engineers as they traveled to Korea, Taiwan, Manchukuo, and China to build roads, canals, ports, dams, cities, irrigation, sewage and water works, and electrical and communications networks. It is a fascinating case study that informs a larger global historiography of the modern technosciences, while also using the social study of technology to extend the historiography of Japanese empire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

MP3: The Meaning of a Format (Duke University Press, 2012) is a fascinating study of the MP3 as a historical, cultural, conceptual, and social phenomenon. In the course of an account of the MP3 that has surprising connections to telephony and the economics of perception, Jonathan Sterne usefully shifts our attention from media-in-general to a more specific focus on material formats, “the stuff beneath, beyond, and behind the boxes our media come in.” MP3 explores the process by which AT&T learned how to make money from the gaps in human hearing. By the 1980s, Sterne shows, engineers had developed methods for using what cannot be heard within the audible spectrum as the basis for a system of data compression for digital sound transmission. The same decade saw a subgroup of the International Organization for Standardization, the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG), devise a standard for digital video and audio with the help of a series of tests that gauged listeners’ levels of sonic annoyance. Sterne shows how the MP3 format emerged out of these overlapping material and social contexts of perception, technics, and experimentation. There are cat pianos and cat telephones (not what you think!) here, as well as accounts of cybernetics and information theory, histories of the domestication of noise, considerations of the challenge of archiving digital mashups, and vignettes about Suzanne Vega and Tom’s Diner. It’s a wonderful book about an important part of our daily media landscape, and it was great fun to talk about it! A review of MP3: The Meaning of Format can be found in Public Books here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

In our digital world, it does seem like paper is dying by inches. Bookstores are going out of business, and more and more people get their news from the internet than from newspapers. But how irrelevant has paper really become? As Ian Samson argues in his new book, Paper: An Elegy (Harper Collins, 2012), not only is paper still vital in our society, it pretty much dominates all our lives. From advertising to currency, to board games and origami, paper still revolves around most business and leisure. Even “post-paper” products, such as e-readers, imitate the aesthetics and feel of paper, mirroring it in spirit if not in product. And how many of us have heard, “yes, I have an e-book reader, but I just really like the feel of a book in my hand”? In this interview, Ian Samson tells us about the history of paper, its uses throughout time, and our love affair with the “ultimate man-made material.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

How do you measure a star? In the middle of the 20thcentury, an interdisciplinary and international community of scientists began using radio waves to measure heavenly bodies and transformed astronomy as a result. David P. D. Munns‘s new book charts the process through which radio astronomers learned to see the sounds of the sky, creating a new space for Cold War science. A Single Sky: How an International Community Forged the Science of Radio Astronomy (MIT Press, 2012) uses the emergence of radio astronomy to upend some of the commonly-held assumptions about the history of the modern sciences. Munns emphasizes the relative freedom of radio astronomers that stands in contrast to the popular meta-narrative of Cold War scientists bound by the interests of the military-industrial complex. He also shifts our focus from the more commonly-studied individual local and national contexts of science to look instead at scientific communities that transcended disciplinary and national boundaries, blending accounts of Australia, the UK, the Netherlands, and the US into a story that emphasizes the importance of cooperation (not competition) in driving scientific development. In addition to this, A Single Sky pays special attention to the importance of material culture (especially that of big radio telescopes) and pedagogy in shaping modern radio astronomy. It’s a fascinating story. Enjoy! For more information about The Dish, a film that Munns mentioned in the course of our conversation, see here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

The advent of very powerful computers and the Internet have not “changed everything,” but it has created a new communications context within which almost everything we do will be somewhat changed. One of the “things we do” is governance, that is, the way we organize ourselves politically and, as a result of that organization, provide for the individual and public good. In his fascinating book Accelerating Democracy: Transforming Governance Through Technology (Princeton UP, 2013), John O. McGinnis examines the promise and peril of advanced computation and Internet communications for our democracy. The former (promise), he says, is great if we think deeply about the impact of the new media on politics and public policy. He proposed that we take the bull by the horns and experiment with new technology so that governance can become both more democratic and more efficient. He suggests a number of ways in which the potential of the new media can be made to do just this. Listen in. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology