Engineers for Change: Competing Visions of Technology in 1960s America
Engineers for Change: Competing Visions of Technology in 1960s America
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变革工程师：20 世纪 60 年代美国技术的竞争愿景
DOI：
10.7551/mitpress/7978.001.0001
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发表时间：
2012
期刊：
影响因子：
56.9
通讯作者：
M. Wisnioski
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
M. Wisnioski
在20世纪60年代末，一群兼而有之的工程师加入了当时反战和民权活动家的行列，呼吁变革。工程师们正在努力重塑他们的职业，挑战他们的工程师同行，以更人性化的眼光看待技术。在《工程师变革》一书中，马修·维斯尼奥斯基（Matthew Wisnioski）阐述了工程领域的这种冲突，并将其与有关技术和美国生活的根深蒂固的假设联系起来。战后美国出现了一种近乎乌托邦式的信仰，相信科技的好处。然而，从20世纪60年代中期开始，受雅克·埃卢（Jacques Ellul）和刘易斯·芒福德（Lewis Mumford）等思想家的反科技著作影响，社会开始以更消极的眼光看待科技。工程师本身被视为支持军工复合体的循规蹈矩的组织人员。少数持不同意见的工程师对他们的职业提出了批评，这些批评挪用了技术批评者的概念。这些持不同政见者反过来受到保守派的批评，后者将他们视为反文化的卢德分子。然而，正如维斯尼奥斯基所言，激进的少数派促使专业精英们对技术有了新的认识，认为它是一种快速发展的力量，而我们的机构却无力应对。技术的负面影响源于其本质，而不是源于工程的失败。“社会技术学家”被招募来帮助社会适应其技术。维斯尼奥斯基认为，20世纪60年代的工程师在回应行业内批评者提出的挑战时，帮助塑造了我们对技术变革作为历史驱动力的主流当代理解。
In the late 1960s an eclectic group of engineers joined the antiwar and civil rights activists of the time in agitating for change. The engineers were fighting to remake their profession, challenging their fellow engineers to embrace a more humane vision of technology. In Engineers for Change, Matthew Wisnioski offers an account of this conflict within engineering, linking it to deep-seated assumptions about technology and American life. The postwar period in America saw a near-utopian belief in technology's beneficence. Beginning in the mid-1960s, however, society--influenced by the antitechnology writings of such thinkers as Jacques Ellul and Lewis Mumford--began to view technology in a more negative light. Engineers themselves were seen as conformist organization men propping up the military-industrial complex. A dissident minority of engineers offered critiques of their profession that appropriated concepts from technology's critics. These dissidents were criticized in turn by conservatives who regarded them as countercultural Luddites. And yet, as Wisnioski shows, the radical minority spurred the professional elite to promote a new understanding of technology as a rapidly accelerating force that our institutions are ill-equipped to handle. The negative consequences of technology spring from its very nature--and not from engineering's failures. "Sociotechnologists" were recruited to help society adjust to its technology. Wisnioski argues that in responding to the challenges posed by critics within their profession, engineers in the 1960s helped shape our dominant contemporary understanding of technological change as the driver of history.