Innovation, Technology, or History: What is the Historiography of Technology About?

Our brief in this symposium is to look at “both the continuing significance of some long-lived patterns in the scholarship of this field, and the importance of newer emergent trends and themes,” particularly in relation to “big questions that scholars—not just historians—might ask about technology, culture, and the world.” Bruce Seely further asked us for “insights about where historians of technology and the Society should be directing their scholarship and activities in the years ahead.” This is a tall and problematic order: what exactly is the field we should be considering, since the study of technology is clearly not confined to self-proclaimed historians of technology? How can we even begin to give a picture of its accomplishments? Indeed, ought we not distrust narratives that purport to tell us where the historiography (and other studies) of technology has been, is, and is going? Furthermore, should we not bear in mind that exhortations that fields are shifting or ought to shift to one particular method, problem, or period often repress rather than stimulate novelty, and reflect a narrowing of conversation and debate, perhaps inevitable in diverse fields, but no less regrettable for that? In this essay I hope to avoid some of these problems by asking an even bigger prior question: what is the history of technology (in many different guises, and in many different modes) the history of? What, in practice, is meant by technology in histories, and what is meant by history in histories of technology? Our thinking about technology, and indeed our thinking about the historiography of technology, is, I suggest, uncritically focused on some, but not all, novelties.