Research in Science and Technology Studies

This volume presents discussions of material culture and society. It offers a perspective that recognizes technology as material culture, that is, as manufactured things spawned by a community and as characteristic of it as its language, behaviour and oral and written knowledge. The chapter "Progress in Separate Spheres" addresses the relationship between the theme of progress and material culture through advertising. Another chapter analyzes the computer and points out that the physical attributes of the machine make it an enigma which cannot be revealed by disassembling its working parts, but must be discovered through the mental comprehension of its processes. Two papers discuss the introduction of technologies to communities from different perspectives. The volume ends with a paper on human automata, an example of an object in which technology and humanity confront each other.