book review technology and culture

Technology and Culture

Ruth Oldenziel, Eindhoven University of Technology

Journal Details

As the incoming editorial team for  Technology and Culture , we are dedicated to increasing the journal’s accessibility by creating larger audiences for our research articles.   

We are looking for submissions that speak to a global audience beyond your topic to help shed light on its significance for scholars working in other topics. Also important is to indicate how your topic is relevant for today’s scholarship. Finally, we would like you to consider how your manuscript would be taught in the classroom.

In all submissions, we are looking to see—at a minimum—a discussion of:

• Historiographical context of your case study
• Global relevance
• Broader significance of your case study

These points should be made clear in the abstract.

Submission of a manuscript implies your assurance that the content has not previously been published in form or in substance, and that the manuscript is not under consideration elsewhere.

Manuscripts may be submitted via Scholastica, our electronic submission system:  technology-and-culture.scholasticahq.com/ . You will have to create a user id on Scholastica to proceed.) We do not accept hard copy submissions. Email submissions will only be accepted if the author is unable to access the Scholastica system.

We can work with files in any common Mac or Windows word processor format, but World Files are preferred. Please do not send a PDF file. Articles are selected by double-blind peer review. The only place your name should appear is on a separate title page; please be sure to remove any self-referencing footnotes as well. If your identity is obvious from the manuscript, it cannot be sent out for review.

Length, format, and style : We have a word limit of 7,500 words (without footnotes) per article, with a maximum of 100 footnotes. Footnotes should not be discursive: if the information is important, put it in the text! We have a limit of six illustrations and or tables. Please upload your illustrations as individual files, do not embed them in the text but upload them on Scholastica as individual files. If you feel that you need to exceed one of these limits significantly, please consult the managing editor ( [email protected] ). Make sure, however, that the manuscript file has callouts indicating where each figure should be placed.

Please use a standard font (e.g., Arial, Times New Roman) in a standard size (12 point). Use minimal formatting. Double space everything, including block quotations, notes, and figure captions, and leave adequate margins. Do not embed illustrations or tables in the text; send them as separate files instead. For notes, we use the Chicago Manual of Style ’s footnotes-bibliography style.

The Hopkins Press Journals Ethics and Malpractice Statement can be found at the ethics-and-malpractice  page.

Peer Review Policy

Technology and Culture (T&C)  seeks to publish outstanding, original contributions to research in the history of technology. Manuscript submissions should not be published or under review elsewhere. The editorial team pre-screens all articles for suitability to the journal’s mission and soundness of scholarship. Submissions accepted for review are sent to two or three peer reviewers, who are given two months to respond. Peer reviewing is double-blind. Referees evaluate the quality and reliability of the scholarship, and its relevance for  T&C ’s broad readership. If referees request revisions, the manuscript may go through multiple rounds of peer review; whenever possible, the same reviewers will read the manuscript through each round of review.

Editor-in-Chief

Ruth Oldenziel,  Eindhoven University of Technology

Managing Editor

Mor Lumbroso,  Foundation for the History of Technology/Eindhoven University of Technology

Book Review Editor

Dick van Lente,  Foundation for the History of Technology/Eindhoven University of Technology

Assistant Book Review Editors 

Henk-Jan Dekker,  Eindhoven University of Technology Leon Vauterin, Eindhoven University of Technology

Public History Editor

Johannes Geert-Hagmann,    Deutsches Museum

Style Editor

Contributing editors.

Yakup Bektas,  Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan Keith Breckenridge,  University of Witwatersrand, South Africa Lino Camprubi,  University of Seville, Spain Yao Dazhi,  Chinese Academy of Science, China Cornelis Disco, Independent Scholar, France Donna Drucker,  Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany Rayvon Fouché, Purdue University, U.S.A. Alexander C. T. Geppert, New York University, U.S.A. Anna Guagnini,  University of Bologna, Italy Liliane Hilaire-Pérez,  Université Paris Diderot, France Chihyung Jeon,  Korean Advanced Institute for Science and Technology, South Korea Eda Kranakis,  University of Ottawa, Canada Leonard Laborie,  Centre national de la recherche scientifique, France Angela Leung,  University of Hong Kong, China Pamela O. Long,  Washington, D.C., USA Carlos López Galviz,  University of Lancaster, UK John Lourdusamy,  Indian Institute of Tech Madras, India Harro Maat,  University of Wageningen, The Netherlands Patrick McCray,  University of California, Santa Barbara, USA Cyrus Mody,  Maastricht University, The Netherlands Jahnavi Phalkey,  Science Gallery, India David Pretel,  Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain Andrew Russell,  SUNY Polytechnic Institute, USA Luisa Sousa,  New University of Lisbon, Portugal Helmuth Trishler,  Deutsches Museum, Germany Matteo Valeriani,  Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Germany, and Tel Aviv University, Israel Dhan Zunino Singh,  University of Quimes, Argentina Geoff Zylstra,  New York City College of Technology, USA

Past Editors-in-Chief

Melvin Kranzberg, 1959–81 Robert C. Post, 1982–95 John M. Staudenmaier, S.J., 1996–2010 Suzanne Moon, 2010-2020

Sponsoring Institutions

Eindhoven University of Technology Foundation for the History of Technology

Book review information can be obtained by contacting: Dick van Lente [email protected]

Please send book review copies to the contact above. Review copies received by the Johns Hopkins University Press office will be discarded.

Abstracting & Indexing Databases

• Bibliography of Asian Studies (Online) , 1975-1991
• Arts & Humanities Citation Index
• Current Contents
• Web of Science
• British and Irish Archaeological Bibliography (Online)
• Dietrich's Index Philosophicus
• IBZ - Internationale Bibliographie der Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaftlichen Zeitschriftenliteratur, coverage dropped
• Internationale Bibliographie der Rezensionen Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaftlicher Literatur, coverage dropped
• Academic Search Alumni Edition, 7/1/1990-
• Academic Search Complete, 7/1/1990-
• Academic Search Elite, 7/1/1990-
• Academic Search Premier, 7/1/1990-
• America: History and Life, 12/1/1958-
• Applied Science & Technology Abstracts (H.W. Wilson), 1/1/1991-7/1/2003
• Applied Science & Technology Full Text (H.W. Wilson), 1/1/1991-7/1/2003
• Applied Science & Technology Index (H.W. Wilson), 1/1/1991-7/1/2003
• Applied Science & Technology Source, 7/1/1990-
• ATLA Religion Database (American Theological Library Association), 1984-1984, dropped
• Biography Index: Past and Present (H.W. Wilson), vol.21, 1980-vol.52, no.2, 2011
• Book Review Digest Plus (H.W. Wilson), Jan.1983-Dec.1993
• Communication Abstracts, 1/1/1975-
• Computer Science Index, 7/1/1990-
• Computers & Applied Sciences Complete, 7/1/1990-
• Current Abstracts, 1/1/2000-
• Historical Abstracts (Online), 1/1/1960-
• Humanities & Social Sciences Index Retrospective: 1907-1984 (H.W. Wilson), 1/1/1974-10/1/1982
• Humanities Source, 1/1/1974-1/1/1982
• Humanities Source Ultimate, 1/1/1974-1/1/1982
• Library & Information Science Source, 7/1/1976-4/1/1977
• MasterFILE Complete, 1/1/1975-
• MasterFILE Elite, 7/1/1990-
• MasterFILE Premier, 7/1/1990-
• MLA International Bibliography (Modern Language Association)
• OmniFile Full Text Mega (H.W. Wilson), 7/1/1980-
• Poetry & Short Story Reference Center, 1/1/1975-
• Public Affairs Index, 7/1/2000-
• RILM Abstracts of Music Literature (Repertoire International de Litterature Musicale)
• Russian Academy of Sciences Bibliographies
• Social Sciences Abstracts (H.W. Wilson), 7/1/1980-
• Social Sciences Full Text (H.W. Wilson), 7/1/1980-
• Social Sciences Index Retrospective: 1907-1983 (H.W. Wilson), 1974/01-1982/10
• SocINDEX, 1/1/1965-
• SocINDEX with Full Text, 1/1/1965-
• STM Source, 7/1/1990-
• TOC Premier (Table of Contents), 1/1/1995-
• Women's Studies International, 1/1/1965-
• Scopus, 1995-, 1984-1993, 1978-1982, 1974-1976, 1970
• Academic ASAP, 01/1987-01/2016
• Book Review Index Plus
• Gale Academic OneFile
• Gale Academic OneFile Select, 01/1987-01/2016
• Gale General OneFile, 01/1987-01/2016
• InfoTrac Custom, 1/1987-1/2016
• Social Sciences Index, 1983/01-1993/12; 1999/07-
• ArticleFirst, vol.33, no.2, 1992-vol.52, no.3, 2011
• Electronic Collections Online, vol.39, no.3, 1998-vol.52, no.3, 2011
• Periodical Abstracts, v.30, n.1, 1989-v.52, n.2, 2011
• Sociological Abstracts (Online), Selective
• Personal Alert (E-mail)
• ABI/INFORM Collection, 1/1/1989-
• ABI/INFORM Global (American Business Information), 1/1/1989-
• Advanced Technologies & Aerospace Database, 1/1/1989-
• Art, Design & Architecture Collection, 01/01/1989-
• Arts & Humanities Database, 01/01/1989-
• Arts Premium Collection, 1/1/1989-
• Business Premium Collection, 01/01/1989-
• Computing Database, 01/01/1989-
• Engineering Database, 01/01/1989-
• Health & Medical Collection
• Health Research Premium Collection
• Hospital Premium Collection
• International Bibliography of Art, Selective
• International Bibliography of the Social Sciences, Core
• Materials Science & Engineering Collection, 1/1/1989-
• Materials Science & Engineering Database, 1/1/1989-
• Medical Database
• Periodicals Index Online
• Professional ABI/INFORM Complete, 01/01/1989-
• Professional ProQuest Central, 01/01/1989-
• ProQuest 5000, 01/01/1989-
• ProQuest 5000 International, 01/01/1989-
• ProQuest Central, 01/01/1989-
• Research Library, 01/01/1989-
• Science Database, 01/01/1989-
• SciTech Premium Collection, 01/01/1989-
• Social Science Database, 1/1/1989-
• Social Science Premium Collection, 01/01/1989-
• Social Services Abstracts, Selective
• Technology Collection, 01/01/1989-
• AATA Online (Art and Archaeology Technical Abstracts), coverage dropped

Abstracting & Indexing Sources

• Children's Book Review Index   (Active)  (Print)
• Academic Index   (Ceased)  (Print)
• Numismatic Literature   (Ceased)  (Print)
• Religion Index One: Periodicals   (Ceased)  (Print)
• Religion Index Two: Multi-Author Works   (Ceased)  (Print)
• Social Planning - Policy & Development Abstracts   (Ceased)  (Print)
• Middle East: Abstracts and Index   (Researched / Unresolved)  (Print)

Source: Ulrichsweb Global Serials Directory.

0.8 (2023) 1,187 Total Cites (2023) 1.2 (Five-Year Impact Factor) 0.00124 (Eigenfactor™ Score) Rank in Category (by Journal Impact Factor): 38of 104 journals, in “History & Philosophy of Science” Quartile - Q2

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Published quarterly

Readers include: Historians of technology; engineers and scientists in many fields; environmental, urban, and intellectual historians; anthropologists, sociologists, and political scientists; teachers, museum professionals, and archivists; and the general public

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"Always full of surprises,  Technology and Culture  is the liveliest, most thought-provoking journal that I read." Ruth S. Cowan | Professor of History and Chair of the Honors College, SUNY-Stony Brook

"As a research tool, a teaching aid, and a fount of reading pleasure,  Technology and Culture  over three decades has contributed more than any other source to our understanding of the ways in which technology shapes history." Thomas P. Hughes | Author of  Rescuing Prometheus

" Technology and Culture  is an invaluable resource for anyone interested in the history of technology and its implications for the present and the future. Every issue of the journal is full of insight and information, and the book review section is without in the field." Henry Petroski | A.S. Vesic Professor of Civil Engineering and Professor of History, Duke University

"The ability to not only use technology but also critically reflect upon its historical and social implications is crucial to humanistic studies as well as the technical disciplines.  Technology and Culture  is the only academic journal exclusively devoted to this essential task and is thus a core journal for us, protected from the ravages of budget cuts for serials." Andrew D. Scrimgeour | Dean of Libraries, Regis University

eTOC (Electronic Table of Contents) alerts can be delivered to your inbox when this or any Hopkins Press journal is published via your ProjectMUSE MyMUSE account. Visit the eTOC instructions page for detailed instructions on setting up your MyMUSE account and alerts.  

Also of Interest

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Judah M. Cohen, Indiana University; Jessica Cooperman, Muhlenberg College; and  Marni Davis, Georgia State University

Leona Toker, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Steven Miles, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Rachel S. Harris, Florida Atlantic University

Anne Reinhardt, Williams College

Clare Anderson, University of Leicester

Nicholas Morrow Williams, Arizona State University

Sabine Huebner, University of Basel, Switzerland

Robin Mitchell-Boyask, Temple University

Dr. Nora Gilbert, University of North Texas

Georgia L. Irby, College of William & Mary

Jeremy A. Greene, M.D., Ph.D., Johns Hopkins University; Alisha Rankin, Ph.D., Tufts University; Gabriela Soto Laveaga, Ph.D., Harvard University

Bruce Holsinger, University of Virginia

Hopkins Press Journals

• DOI: 10.1177/0894439304268537
• Corpus ID: 220163915

Book Review: Culture and Technology

• Published 1 November 2004
• Social Science Computer Review

2 References

Book reviews: the electronic word: democracy, technology, and the arts, related papers.

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February 15th, 2021

Read the latest research and book reviews in Technology and Culture!

October 2020 , Vol 61, No 4

Special issue, manufacturing modernity: innovations in early modern europe.

Manufacturing Modernity: Innovations in Early Modern Europe—An Introduction | Adam Lucas

A Politics of Intellectual Property: Creating a Patent System in Revolutionary France | Jérôme Baudry

Illuminated Publics: Representations of Street Lamps in Revolutionary France | Benjamin Bothereau

Producers and Consumers Negotiating Scale: Micro-Inventions in Eighteenth-century France and Br itain | Marie Thébaud-Sorger

Machines, Motion, Mechanics: Philosophers Engineering the Fountains of Versailles | Luciano Boschiero

A New Perspective on the Natural Philosophy of Steams and its Relation to the Steam Engine | David Philip Miller

Public History

Public History Take 1: Historians of Technology Watching Chernobyl | The Editors

  Chernobyl the TV Series : On Suspending the Truth or What’s the Benefit of Lies? | Sonja D. Schmid

Ukrainian Memory Spaces and Nuclear Technology: the Musealization of Chornobyl’s Disaster | Anna Veronika Wendland

Chernobyl as Technoscience | Eglė Rindzevičiūtė

Conference Report

 Forty-Sixth Symposium of the International Committee for the History of Technology: “Technology and Power,” University of Silesia, Katowice, Poland (22–27 July 2019) | Sławomir Łotysz, Ciro Paoletti, Glen O’Sullivan, Kamna Tiwary, Magdalena Zdrodowska

Archives Revisited

Sixty-years of Scholarship | The Editors

Urban Transport and Mobility in Technology and Culture | Peter Norton

Book Reviews

Review of Technology: Critical History of a Concept by Eric Schatzberg | David E. Nye

Review of Fifty Years of Medieval Technology and Social Change edited by Steven A. Walton | Adam Lucas

Review of Alles im Fluss: Die Lebensadern unserer Gesellschaft [Everything Flows: The Lifeblood of our Society] by Dirk van Laak | Nil Disco

Review of Screen Culture: A Global History by Richard Butsch | Noah Arceneaux

Review of Technology and Rural Change in Eastern India 1830-1980 by Smritikumar Sarkar | Animesh Chatterjee

Review of Ceramics in Circumpolar Prehistory: Technology, Lifeways and Cuisine edited by Peter Jordan and Kevin Gibbs | Ian Gilligan

Review of Bored, Lonely, Angry, Stupid: Changing Feelings About Technology, From the Telegraph to Twitter by Luke Fernandez and Susan J. Matt | Martina Hessler

Review of Visualizing Taste: How Business Changed the Look of What You Eat by Ai Hisano | Barkha Kagliwal 

Review of Delayed Response: The Art of Waiting from the Ancient to the Instant World by Jason Farman | David Zvi Kalman

Review of Managing the Experience of Hearing Loss in Britain, 1830–1930 by Grame Gooday and Karen Sayer | Coreen McGuire

Review of Archaeologies of Touch: Interfacing with Haptics from Electricity to Computers by David Parisi | Rachel Plotnick

Review of Silent Serial Sensations: The Wharton Brothers and the Magic of Early Cinema by Barbara Tepa Lupack | J. P. Telotte

Review of Electrified Voices: How the Telephone, Phonograph, and Radio Shaped Modern Japan, 1868-1945 by Kerim Yasar | Daqing Yang

Review of Spectacular Flops: Game-Changing Technologies That Failed by Michael Brian Schiffer | Jonathan Coopersmith

Review of Taking Nazi Technology: Allied Exploitation of German Science after the Second World War by Douglas O’Reagan | Bruce Seely

Review of The American Lab: An Insider’s History of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory by C. Bruce Tarter | Benjamin Sims

Review of The TVs of Tomorrow: How RCA’s Flat-Screen Dreams Led to the First LCDs by Benjamin Gross | Michael Aaron Dennis

Review of Transnational Cultures of Expertise. Circulating State-Related Knowledge in the 18th and 19th Centuries edited by Lothar Schilling and Jacob Vogel | Göran Rydén

Review of Die Versorgung der Hauptstadt der Bewegung. Infrastrukturen und Stadtgesellschaft im nationalsozialistischen München [Supplying the Capital of the Movement: Infrastructures and Urban Society in National Socialist Munich] by Mathias Irlinger | Jens Ivo Engels

Review of A River in the City of Fountains: An Environmental History of Kansas City and the Missouri River by Amahia K. Mallea | Brian Frehner

Review of Submarine Telegraphy and the Hunt for Gutta Percha: Challenge and Opportunity in a Global Trade by Helen Godfrey | Bruce J. Hunt

Review of Wege in die Digitale Gesellschaft: Computernutzung in der Bundesrepublik 1955-1990 [Towards a Digital Society: Computer Use in West Germany 1955-1990] edited by Frank Bösch | Corinna Schlombs

Review of Respawn: Gamers, Hackers, and Technogenic Life by Colin Milburn | Pieter Van den Heede

Review of When They Hid the Fire: A History of Electricity and Invisible Energy in America by Daniel French | Michael Kay

Review of Radio Soundings: South Africa and the Black Modern by Liz Gunner | Marissa J. Moorman

Review of Landscapes of Power: Politics of Energy in the Navajo Nation by Dana E. Powell | Caleb Wellum

Review of The Chinese and the Iron Road: Building the Transcontinental Railroad edited by Gordon H. Chang and Shelley Fisher Fishkin | Robert Cliver

Review of Harvest of Hazards: Family Farming, Accidents, and Expertise in the Corn Belt, 1940 -1975 by Derek S. Oden | Mark D. Hersey

Review of Toxic Shock: A Social History by Sharra L. Vostral | Donna J. Drucker

Review of Poisonous Skies: Acid Rain and the Globalization of Pollution by Rachel Emma Rothschild | Blair Stein

Review of Architectural Intelligence: How Designers and Architects Created the Digital Landscape by Molly Wright Steenson | Orit Halpern

Review of Think Tank Aesthetics: Midcentury Modernism, the Cold War, and the Neoliberal Present by Pamela M. Lee | B. Jack Hanly

Review of Behind the Exhibit: Displaying Science and Technology at World’s Fairs and Museums in the Twentieth Century edited by Elena Canadelli, Marco Beretta, and Laura Ronzon | Morris Low

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Human-Built World

How to think about technology and culture.

Thomas P. Hughes

Read an excerpt .

240 pages | 42 halftones | 5 1/4 x 8 | © 2004

science.culture

Architecture: American Architecture , European Architecture

Art: Art--General Studies

History: American History , Discoveries and Exploration , General History , History of Ideas , History of Technology

History of Science

Philosophy of Science

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"As Thomas P. Hughes shows in this brilliantly concise history, people were arguing about the rights and wrongs of technology long before the term gained currency in the 20th century. Hughes, a former Pulitzer Prize finalist and the US’s most eminent historian of technology, is correct to interpret the term in the broadest sense. . . . Drawing on the views of philosophers, churchmen, artists, social theorists and engineers, Hughes shows how much of the controversy surrounding technology has reflected an ambivalence about the human will to create. . . . As Hughes shows, these arguments have grown more acute, especially as technology has moved from the idealism of the "machine age" to a more modern and more insidious development based on systems, controls, and communication."

Mark Archer | Financial Times

" Human-Built World offers a thoroughgoing, incisively rendered, and engaging history of humanity’s relationship to technology. . . . Although Hughes gives invention and engineering a central role in the creation of our world, the purpose of his sprightly polemic is to rail against technological determinism. . . . Human-Built World is, in one sense, a call for greater and more widespread education about technology. . . . As technically based systems already invisibly govern so much of our daily lives and will continue to penetrate our culture still further, this is a timely and urgent book."

Adam Wishart | Times Literary Supplement

"America’s foremost historian of technology."

Eliot A. Cohen | Foreign Affairs

"A virtuoso overview of the various relationships between technology, commerce, society, art, and the military."

Graham Farmelo | Nature

"Hughes goes on to provide a compelling story of how engineering was thought to have the capability, and indeed the destiny, of providing a second (and better) edenic creation. . . . An excellent overview of how to think about culture and technology. The book should be required reading for anyone who aspires to participate meaningfully in our technological society."

Domenico Grasso | Science

"In Human-Built World , Thomas Hughes draws on the breadth and depth of his long career as one of the 20th century’s most eminent historians of technology. This concise book not only charts a course through a rich sea of intellectual engagements . . . it also implicitly documents Hughes own intellectual journey."

Emily Thompson | American Scientist

"Were I to teach a survey course on the history of modern technology, I would strongly consider using this book. Thomas P. Hughes takes the reader over a vast stretch of time and through complex ideas and scores of individuals to present an intellectual history of technology."

Paul Josephson | American Historical Review

“Do not be deceived: this work may be short and written for the general public, but this senior statesman of our field distills a great deal into Human-Built World . . . . [Hughes] argues that particularly after the industrial revolution, Western cultures reconstructed the material world and reconceived their relationship to nature, as people ‘believed that they had the creative technological power to make a world according to their own blueprints.’ . . . If a doctoral thesis crawls over one patch of ground, this book jets over the landscape of our discipline, emphasizing its adjacence to art, architecture, literature, and environmental history. . . . What Hughes has done is distill much of our discipline into a small compass. Human-Build World can serve as the framework for an undergraduate course.”--David Nye, Technology and Culture  

David E. Nye | Technology and Culture

"I have difficulty finding weak spots in this book. . . . It is a well composed study that Iwill gladly recommend both as course literature and to colleagues and friends."

Nina Wormbs | Nuncius

"For almost four decades, Thomas Parke Hughes has been shaping scholarly discourse in the hiostory of technology. He has explored technology in the small and in the large . . . and most important, he has been a central figure in efforts to build a bridge between technical and humanistic cultures. . . . Now, after years of scholarly study, Hughes has stepped back to reflect on the larger meaning of what he has learned."

Arthur Molella | Minerva

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The chicago guide to communicating science.

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Technology and Culture 1st Edition

• ISBN-10 1577666089
• ISBN-13 978-1577666080
• Edition 1st
• Publisher Waveland Pr Inc
• Publication date June 10, 2009
• Language English
• Dimensions 6 x 0.25 x 8.75 inches
• Print length 160 pages
• See all details

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From the back cover, product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Waveland Pr Inc; 1st edition (June 10, 2009)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 160 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1577666089
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1577666080
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 8 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 0.25 x 8.75 inches
• #3,393 in Social Aspects of Technology
• #8,659 in Anthropology (Books)
• #12,011 in General Anthropology

About the author

Allen batteau.

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Algorithms are everywhere

Three new books warn against turning into the person the algorithm thinks you are.

• Bryan Gardiner archive page

Like a lot of Netflix subscribers, I find that my personal feed tends to be hit or miss. Usually more miss. The movies and shows the algorithms recommend often seem less predicated on my viewing history and ratings, and more geared toward promoting whatever’s newly available. Still, when a superhero movie starring one of the world’s most famous actresses appeared in my “Top Picks” list, I dutifully did what 78 million other households did and clicked .

As I watched the movie, something dawned on me: recommendation algorithms like the ones Netflix pioneered weren’t just serving me what they thought I’d like—they were also shaping what gets made. And not in a good way. 

The movie in question wasn’t bad, necessarily. The acting was serviceable, and it had high production values and a discernible plot (at least for a superhero movie). What struck me, though, was a vague sense of déjà vu—as if I’d watched this movie before, even though I hadn’t. When it ended, I promptly forgot all about it. 

That is, until I started reading Kyle Chayka’s recent book, Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture . A staff writer for the New Yorker, Chayka is an astute observer of the ways the internet and social media affect culture. “Filterworld” is his coinage for “the vast, interlocking … network of algorithms” that influence both our daily lives and the “way culture is distributed and consumed.” 

Music, film, the visual arts, literature, fashion, journalism, food—Chayka argues that algorithmic recommendations have fundamentally altered all these cultural products, not just influencing what gets seen or ignored but creating a kind of self-reinforcing blandness we are all contending with now.

That superhero movie I watched is a prime example. Despite my general ambivalence toward the genre, Netflix’s algorithm placed the film at the very top of my feed, where I was far more likely to click on it. And click I did. That “choice” was then recorded by the algorithms, which probably surmised that I liked the movie and then recommended it to even more viewers. Watch, wince, repeat.  

“Filterworld culture is ultimately homogenous,” writes Chayka, “marked by a pervasive sense of sameness even when its artifacts aren’t literally the same.” We may all see different things in our feeds, he says, but they are increasingly the same kind of different. Through these milquetoast feedback loops, what’s popular becomes more popular, what’s obscure quickly disappears, and the lowest-­common-denominator forms of entertainment inevitably rise to the top again and again. 

This is actually the opposite of the personalization Netflix promises, Chayka notes. Algorithmic recommendations reduce taste —traditionally, a nuanced and evolving opinion we form about aesthetic and artistic matters—into a few easily quantifiable data points. That oversimplification subsequently forces the creators of movies, books, and music to adapt to the logic and pressures of the algorithmic system. Go viral or die. Engage. Appeal to as many people as possible. Be popular.  

A joke posted on X by a Google engineer sums up the problem: “A machine learning algorithm walks into a bar. The bartender asks, ‘What’ll you have?’ The algorithm says, ‘What’s everyone else having?’” “In algorithmic culture, the right choice is always what the majority of other people have already chosen,” writes Chayka. 

One challenge for someone writing a book like Filterworld— or really any book dealing with matters of cultural import—is the danger of (intentionally or not) coming across as a would-be arbiter of taste or, worse, an outright snob. As one might ask, what’s wrong with a little mindless entertainment? (Many asked just that in response to Martin Scorsese’s controversial Harper’s essay   in 2021, which decried Marvel movies and the current state of cinema.) 

Chayka addresses these questions head on. He argues that we’ve really only traded one set of gatekeepers (magazine editors, radio DJs, museum curators) for another (Google, Facebook, TikTok, Spotify). Created and controlled by a handful of unfathomably rich and powerful companies (which are usually led by a rich and powerful white man), today’s algorithms don’t even attempt to reward or amplify quality, which of course is subjective and hard to quantify. Instead, they focus on the one metric that has come to dominate all things on the internet: engagement.

There may be nothing inherently wrong (or new) about paint-by-numbers entertainment designed for mass appeal. But what algorithmic recommendations do is supercharge the incentives for creating only that kind of content, to the point that we risk not being exposed to anything else.

“Culture isn’t a toaster that you can rate out of five stars,” writes Chayka, “though the website Goodreads, now owned by Amazon, tries to apply those ratings to books. There are plenty of experiences I like—a plotless novel like Rachel Cusk’s Outline , for example—that others would doubtless give a bad grade. But those are the rules that Filterworld now enforces for everything.”

Chayka argues that cultivating our own personal taste is important, not because one form of culture is demonstrably better than another, but because that slow and deliberate process is part of how we develop our own identity and sense of self. Take that away, and you really do become the person the algorithm thinks you are. 

Algorithmic omnipresence

As Chayka points out in Filterworld , algorithms “can feel like a force that only began to exist … in the era of social networks” when in fact they have “a history and legacy that has slowly formed over centuries, long before the Internet existed.” So how exactly did we arrive at this moment of algorithmic omnipresence? How did these recommendation machines come to dominate and shape nearly every aspect of our online and (increasingly) our offline lives? Even more important, how did we ourselves become the data that fuels them?

These are some of the questions Chris Wiggins and Matthew L. Jones set out to answer in How Data Happened: A History from the Age of Reason to the Age of Algorithms . Wiggins is a professor of applied mathematics and systems biology at Columbia University. He’s also the New York Times ’ chief data scientist. Jones is now a professor of history at Princeton. Until recently, they both taught an undergrad course at Columbia, which served as the basis for the book.

They begin their historical investigation at a moment they argue is crucial to understanding our current predicament: the birth of statistics in the late 18th and early 19th century. It was a period of conflict and political upheaval in Europe. It was also a time when nations were beginning to acquire both the means and the motivation to track and measure their populations at an unprecedented scale.

“War required money; money required taxes; taxes required growing bureaucracies; and these bureaucracies needed data,” they write. “Statistics”may have originally described “knowledge of the state and its resources, without any particularly quantitative bent or aspirations at insights,” but that quickly began to change as new mathematical tools for examining and manipulating data emerged.

One of the people wielding these tools was the 19th-century Belgian astronomer Adolphe Quetelet. Famous for, among other things, developing the highly problematic body mass index (BMI) , Quetelet had the audacious idea of taking the statistical techniques his fellow astronomers had developed to study the position of stars and using them to better understand society and its people. This new “social physics,” based on data about phenomena like crime and human physical characteristics, could in turn reveal hidden truths about humanity, he argued.

“Quetelet’s flash of genius—whatever its lack or rigor—was to treat averages about human beings as if they were real quantities out there that we were discovering,” write Wiggins and Jones. “He acted as if the average height of a population was a real thing, just like the position of a star.” 

From Quetelet and his “average man” to Francis Galton’s eugenics to Karl Pearson and Charles Spearman’s “general intelligence,” Wiggins and Jones chart a depressing progression of attempts—many of them successful—to use data as a scientific basis for racial and social hierarchies. Data added “a scientific veneer to the creation of an entire apparatus of discrimination and disenfranchisement,” they write. It’s a legacy we’re still contending with today. 

Another misconception that persists? The notion that data about people are somehow objective measures of truth. “Raw data is an oxymoron,” observed the media historian Lisa Gitelman a number of years ago. Indeed, all data collection is the result of human choice, from what to collect to how to classify it to who’s included and excluded. 

Whether it’s poverty, prosperity, intelligence, or creditworthiness, these aren’t real things that can be measured directly, note Wiggins and Jones. To quantify them, you need to choose an easily measured proxy. This “reification” (“literally, making a thing out of an abstraction about real things”) may be necessary in many cases, but such choices are never neutral or unproblematic. “Data is made, not found,” they write, “whether in 1600 or 1780 or 2022.”

“We don’t need to build systems that learn the stratifications of the past and present and reinforce them in the future.”

Perhaps the most impressive feat Wiggins and Jones pull off in the book as they continue to chart data’s evolution throughout the 20th century and the present day is dismantling the idea that there is something inevitable about the way technology progresses. 

For Quetelet and his ilk, turning to numbers to better understand humans and society was not an obvious choice. Indeed, from the beginning, everyone from artists to anthropologists understood the inherent limitations of data and quantification, making some of the same critiques of statisticians that Chayka makes of today’s algorithmic systems (“Such statisticians ‘see quality not at all, but only quantity’”).

Whether they’re talking about the machine-learning techniques that underpin today’s AI efforts or an internet built to harvest our personal data and sell us stuff, Wiggins and Jones recount many moments in history when things could have just as likely gone a different way.

“The present is not a prison sentence, but merely our current snapshot,” they write. “We don’t have to use unethical or opaque algorithmic decision systems, even in contexts where their use may be technically feasible. Ads based on mass surveillance are not necessary elements of our society. We don’t need to build systems that learn the stratifications of the past and present and reinforce them in the future. Privacy is not dead because of technology; it’s not true that the only way to support journalism or book writing or any craft that matters to you is spying on you to service ads. There are alternatives.” 

A pressing need for regulation

If Wiggins and Jones’s goal was to reveal the intellectual tradition that underlies today’s algorithmic systems, including “the persistent role of data in rearranging power,” Josh Simons is more interested in how algorithmic power is exercised in a democracy and, more specifically, how we might go about regulating the corporations and institutions that wield it.

Currently a research fellow in political theory at Harvard, Simons has a unique background. Not only did he work for four years at Facebook, where he was a founding member of what became the Responsible AI team, but he previously served as a policy advisor for the Labour Party in the UK Parliament. 

In Algorithms for the People: Democracy in the Age of AI , Simons builds on the seminal work of authors like Cathy O’Neil , Safiya Noble , and Shoshana Zuboff to argue that algorithmic prediction is inherently political . “My aim is to explore how to make democracy work in the coming age of machine learning,” he writes . “Our future will be determined not by the nature of machine learning itself—machine learning models simply do what we tell them to do—but by our commitment to regulation that ensures that machine learning strengthens the foundations of democracy.”

Much of the first half of the book is dedicated to revealing all the ways we continue to misunderstand the nature of machine learning, and how its use can profoundly undermine democracy. And what if a “thriving democracy”—a term Simons uses throughout the book but never defines—isn’t always compatible with algorithmic governance? Well, it’s a question he never really addresses. 

Whether these are blind spots or Simons simply believes that algorithmic prediction is, and will remain, an inevitable part of our lives, the lack of clarity doesn’t do the book any favors. While he’s on much firmer ground when explaining how machine learning works and deconstructing the systems behind Google’s PageRank and Facebook’s Feed, there remain omissions that don’t inspire confidence. For instance, it takes an uncomfortably long time for Simons to even acknowledge one of the key motivations behind the design of the PageRank and Feed algorithms: profit. Not something to overlook if you want to develop an effective regulatory framework. 

“The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.”

Much of what’s discussed in the latter half of the book will be familiar to anyone following the news around platform and internet regulation (hint: that we should be treating providers more like public utilities). And while Simons has some creative and intelligent ideas, I suspect even the most ardent policy wonks will come away feeling a bit demoralized given the current state of politics in the United States. 

In the end, the most hopeful message these books offer is embedded in the nature of algorithms themselves. In Filterworld , Chayka includes a quote from the late, great anthropologist David Graeber: “The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.” It’s a sentiment echoed in all three books—maybe minus the “easily” bit. 

Algorithms may entrench our biases, homogenize and flatten culture, and exploit and suppress the vulnerable and marginalized. But these aren’t completely inscrutable systems or inevitable outcomes. They can do the opposite, too. Look closely at any machine-learning algorithm and you’ll inevitably find people—people making choices about which data to gather and how to weigh it, choices about design and target variables. And, yes, even choices about whether to use them at all. As long as algorithms are something humans make, we can also choose to make them differently. 

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Front Cover : A cut-off of section 18 in the scroll entitled Street Scenes in Timesof Peace (Taiping fenghui tu), attributed to Zhu Yu (Zhu Junbi) 朱玉 (朱君璧1293–1365). This style of typological representation became popular in China by the 10th century, it is believed to have served as model-book rather than constituting a painting by itself. The scroll is unique in its focus on social and professional activities. The cut-off shows masons preparing various construction elements, among the bases for columns. Another man seems to carve decorations into a stone. (Copyright: The Art Institute of Chicago.)

Technology and Culture

In this Issue

• Volume 62, Number 2, April 2021

Technology and Culture , the preeminent journal of the history of technology, draws on scholarship in diverse disciplines to publish insightful pieces intended for general readers as well as specialists. Subscribers include scientists, engineers, anthropologists, sociologists, economists, museum curators, archivists, scholars, librarians, educators, historians, and many others. In addition to scholarly essays, each issue features 30-40 book reviews and reviews of new museum exhibitions. To illuminate important debates and draw attention to specific topics, the journal occasionally publishes thematic issues. Technology and Culture is the official journal of the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) .

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• Technology Is Global: The Useful & Reliable Knowledge Debate
• Dagmar Schäfer , Simona Valeriani
• pp. 327-347
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2021.0061

• Timekeepers and Sufi Mystics: Technical Knowledge Bearers of the Ottoman Empire
• Feza Günergun
• pp. 348-372
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2021.0063
• Useful Work: State Demands and Craftsmen's Social Mobility in Fifteenth-Century China
• Dagmar Schäfer
• pp. 373-400
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2021.0060
• Making and Using Scientific Instruments in Japan: How Scholars and Craftsmen Cooperated, 1781–1853
• Takehiko Hashimoto
• pp. 401-422
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2021.0059
• Introduction and Diffusion: Useful and Reliable Knowledge in Early Modern Industrial Japan
• Masayuki Tanimoto
• pp. 423-441
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2021.0058
• The Codification of Techniques: Between Bureaucracy and the Markets in Early Modern Europe from a Global Perspective
• Liliane Hilaire-Pérez
• pp. 442-466
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2021.0056
• Grasping the Body: Physicians, Tailors, and Holy People
• Simona Valeriani
• pp. 467-493
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2021.0057
• Useful & Reliable: Technological Transformation in Colonial India
• Tirthankar Roy
• pp. 494-520
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2021.0055
• Crisis : The Emergence of Another Hazardous Concept
• Rosalind Williams
• pp. 521-546
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2021.0062
• Contested Heritage in East Asia: Colonial Memory & Technology Sites
• Johannes-Geert Hagmann
• pp. 547-550
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2021.0054
• How an Imperial Military Laboratory Became a Museum for Peace
• Daisuke Konagaya
• pp. 551-560
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2021.0053
• "Difficult Heritage" & Selective Elision: The Seoul Power Plant
• John P. DiMoia
• pp. 561-572
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2021.0052
• Contested Tracks to Modernity: Negotiating Narratives at Taiwan's Railway Department Park
• Hsien-Chun Wang
• pp. 573-583
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2021.0064
• Katrina: A History, 1915–2015 by Andy Horowitz (review)
• Cornelis Disco
• pp. 584-585
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2021.0085
• Atomic Junction: Nuclear Power in Africa after Independence by Abena Dove Osseo-Asare (review)
• Damilola Adebayo
• pp. 586-587
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2021.0093
• Bridging the Seas: The Rise of Naval Architecture in the Industrial Age, 1800–2000 by Larrie D. Ferreiro (review)
• Apostolos Delis
• pp. 588-589
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2021.0078
• Science, Technology, and Utopias: Women Artists and Cold War America by Christine Filippone (review)
• Charlie Gere
• pp. 590-591
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2021.0079
• Kao Gong Ji: The World's Oldest Encyclopaedia of Technologies trans. by Guan Zengjian and Konrad Herrmann (review)
• Jianjun Mei
• pp. 591-593
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2021.0101
• The English East India Company's Silk Enterprise in Bengal, 1750–1850: Economy, Empire and Business by Karolina Hutková (review)
• Aparajita Mukhopadhyay
• pp. 593-595
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2021.0086
• Materielle Kultur und Konsum in der Frühen Neuzeit [Material culture and consumption in the early modern era] ed. by Julia A. Schmidt-Funke (review)
• Reinhold Reith
• pp. 595-597
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2021.0096
• Braunschweig und der Kaffee. Die Geschichte des Röstkaffeemarktes von den Anfängen bis in unsere Tage [Braunschweig and coffee: The history of the coffee roasting market from the beginning to the present] by Peter Albrecht (review)
• Margrit Schulte Beerbühl
• pp. 597-598
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2021.0066
• On Time: A History of Western Timekeeping by Ken Mondschein (review)
• Alexis McCrossen
• pp. 599-600
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2021.0091
• Making Time: Astronomical Time Measurement in Tokugawa Japan by Yulia Frumer (review)
• David Wittner
• pp. 600-602
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2021.0080
• Steps toward a Philosophy of Engineering: Historico-Philosophical and Critical Essays by Carl Mitcham (review)
• Cyrus C. M. Mody
• pp. 602-604
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2021.0090
• The Anthropocene and the Humanities: From Climate Change to a New Age of Sustainability by Carolyn Merchant (review)
• Harry Lintsen
• pp. 604-606
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2021.0089
• Recycling and Reuse in the Roman Economy ed. by Chloë N. Duckworth and Andrew Wilson (review)
• Allison L. C. Emmerson
• pp. 606-608
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2021.0076
• America by the Numbers: Quantification, Democracy, and the Birth of National Statistics by Emmanuel Didier (review)
• pp. 608-610
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2021.0075
• A Modern Contagion: Imperialism and Public Health in Iran's Age of Cholera by Amir A. Afkhami (review)
• pp. 610-611
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2021.0065
• Governing Systems: Modernity and the Making of Public Health in England, 1830–1910 by Tom Crook (review)
• Leslie Tomory
• pp. 612-613
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2021.0073
• Policing the Open Road: How Cars Transformed American Freedom by Sarah A. Seo (review)
• Peter Norton
• pp. 614-615
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2021.0097
• Sulphuric Utopias: A History of Maritime Fumigation by Lukas Engelmann and Christos Lynteris (review)
• Brad Bolman
• pp. 616-617
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2021.0077
• Testing Hearing: The Making of Modern Aurality ed. by Viktoria Tkaczyk et al. (review)
• Graeme Gooday
• pp. 618-619
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2021.0099
• Easing Pain on the Western Front: American Nurses of the Great War and the Birth of Modern Nursing Practice by Paul E. Stepansky (review)
• Sasha Mullally
• pp. 620-621
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2021.0098
• The Circulation of Penicillin in Spain: Health, Wealth and Authority by María Jesús Santesmases (review)
• Agata Ignaciuk
• pp. 622-623
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2021.0095
• Making Industrial Pittsburgh Modern: Environment, Landscape, Transportation, and Planning by Edward K. Muller and Joel A. Tarr (review)
• Paul van de Laar
• pp. 624-625
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2021.0092
• Cities, Railways, Modernities: London, Paris, and the Nineteenth Century by Carlos López Galviz (review)
• pp. 626-627
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2021.0082
• Ferrocarril y modernización en Quito: Un cambio dramático entre 1905 y 1922 [The railway and modernization in Quito: A dramatic change between 1905 and 1922] by Wilson Miño Grijalva (review)
• J. Justin Castro
• pp. 628-629
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2021.0083
• Design Technics: Archaeologies of Architectural Practice ed. by Zeynep Çelik Alexander and John May (review)
• Giorgio Marfella
• pp. 630-631
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2021.0067
• Modern Architecture and Climate: Design before Air Conditioning by Daniel Barber (review)
• Betsy Frederick-Rothwell
• pp. 632-633
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2021.0068
• Engineering the Eternal City: Infrastructure, Topography, and the Culture of Knowledge in Late Sixteenth-Century Rome by Pamela O. Long (review)
• pp. 634-635
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2021.0088
• Mobilités d’ingénieurs en Europe, XVe–XVIIIe siècle [Mobility of engineers in Europe, 15th–18th century] ed. by Stéphane Blond et al. (review)
• Konstantinos Chatzis
• pp. 636-637
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2021.0069
• Engineers, unity, expansion, fragmentation (19th and 20th centuries), volume 1: The production of a social group ed. by Antoine Derouet and Simon Paye (review)
• Alain P. Michel
• pp. 638-640
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2021.0074
• The Italian Renaissance of Machines by Paolo Galluzzi (review)
• Michael Kucher
• pp. 640-642
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2021.0081
• A Rainbow Palate: How Chemical Dyes Changed the West's Relationship to Food by Carolyn Cobbold (review)
• Peter Thompson
• pp. 642-643
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2021.0072
• Berliner Blau: Vom frühneuzeitlichen Pigment zum modernen Hightech-Material [Prussian blue: From early modern pigment to modern high-tech material] by Alexander Kraft (review)
• Agustí Nieto-Galan
• pp. 644-645
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2021.0102
• On the Screen: Displaying the Moving Image, 1926–1942 by Ariel Rogers (review)
• Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece
• pp. 646-647
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2021.0094
• The Radio Hobby, Private Associations, and the Challenge of Modernity in Germany by Bruce B. Campbell (review)
• Christian Henrich-Franke
• pp. 648-649
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2021.0071
• The Future of Change: How Technology Shapes Social Revolutions by Ray Brescia (review)
• Allison Perlman
• pp. 650-651
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2021.0070
• Shakespeare, Technicity, Theatre by W. B. Worthen, and: Shakespeare, Spectatorship, and the Technologies of Performance by Pascale Aebischer (review)
• Sarah Kriger
• pp. 652-654
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2021.0100
• If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future by Jill Lepore (review)
• pp. 655-656
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2021.0087
• Wie die Welt in den Computer kam: Zur Entstehung digitaler Wirklichkeit [How the world came to be in the computer: On the creation of digital reality] by David Gugerli (review)
• Martin Schmitt
• pp. 657-658
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2021.0084

Previous Issue

Volume 62, Number 1, January 2021

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• Arts & Culture

Book review: Graham Norton’s novel will dominate the bestseller list for many months

Graham Norton is unlikely to give up his TV role to become a full-time writer, but he can based on ‘Frankie’. Picture: Ellie Smith

• Graham Norton 
• Coronet, €15.99 

Graham Norton is unlikely to want to give up his glitzy day job and become a full-time writer, but his fifth novel, Frankie , proves that if he wanted to, he could. 

The story is beautifully crafted and impeccably researched, taking the reader on a rollercoaster ride of emotional highs and lows. 

It also has flashes of dry wit and memorable turns of phrase, as you would expect from Norton.

It travels from contemporary London to 1950s Cork and on to New York City, particularly Greenwich Village and the flourishing contemporary art scene of the ‘60s and ‘70s, back to London in the ‘80s and ‘90s and the present day. 

Each era is convincingly evoked, rich in detail, and the prose is enlivened by some terrible jokes from Frankie’s lifelong friend, Nor.

It opens in the present day with the thoughts of Damian, a young Irishman living in London, working as a carer, looking after wealthy old people with large homes in west London. 

When a job comes up in east London, near Damian’s rented house-share, “Frances Howe, eighty-four. Lives alone. Broken ankle,” his manager offers it to him, adding “And she’s Irish so that’ll be nice for you.” 

This lumping together of Irish people, annoys Damian, reminding him of the way straight friends proudly announced the existence of their other gay friend.

 “You’ve got to meet him. You’ll love him.…He failed to see how any amount of Irishness would give him something in common with an incapacitated eighty-four-year-old woman.” 

The woman, Frankie, is described by her friend Nor as “cranky” since her fall. Nor is a more colourful character than Frankie, tall and stylish in a bohemian way and obviously wealthy. 

Damien rightly concludes that Nor, not Frankie, will be paying for his services.

It turns out that Frankie and Damian are from the same part of west Cork, and there is a growing rapport.

Then the scene changes to Ireland 1950, and 10-year-old Frances Howe’s unhappy life in Ballytoor. 

From a very young age she learns to mistrust happiness, and sure enough, after a highly enjoyable birthday party she comes home to discover that her parents have died in a car crash. 

Her subsequent misery is only made bearable by her friendship with Norah Deane, who shares her off-beat sense of humour.

After school, Frances takes a cookery course in Cork city and shows unusual talent. 

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FICTION The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story Olga Tokarczuk Text, $34.99

“I write for intelligent people, not idiots.” Those of us who slogged our way through Olga Tokarczuk’s 1500-page magnum opus, The Books of Jacob , might well have patted ourselves on the back and haughtily taken the Nobel laureate’s words to heart. We had ascended the mountain and were ready to claim the crown.

Intellectual smugness is a prime target of Olga Tokarczuk’s latest novel. Credit: Friso Gentsch

It is downright funny, then, that intellectual smugness is a prime target of Tokarczuk’s latest novel, The Empusium . There is, after all, a fine line between intelligence and idiocy.

Subtitled A Health Resort Horror Story , The Empusium harks back to the great novels of early 20th-century European literature, when sanatoria were the proving grounds for big ideas on the page. Tokarczuk has said that she wrote it in conversation with Thomas Mann’s masterpiece, The Magic Mountain – published exactly a century ago – and that she sought to engage with that book’s ideas and interrogate its silences. It could have been a disastrous exercise in high-lit navel-gazing.

Instead, The Empusium is an emphatic triumph – a feast of culture, both literary and popular, highbrow and low, that shows Tokarczuk writing at the peak of her powers and enjoying every moment of it.

Mieczyslaw Wojnicz, a young engineering student from Lwow, steps off a train in the small Silesian town of Gorbesdorf. He is headed to the local sanatorium, ostensibly to seek treatment for tuberculosis, but also to rid him of what his father calls his “feminine” inclinations.

In a rather Kafkaesque turn (it’s also the centenary of the Czech great’s death), the sanatorium is full, and so Wojnicz finds lodging at the Guesthouse for Gentlemen, a downtrodden hotel populated by an odd assortment of sanatorium rejects.

The men chat, as men of that ilk do, and gather each night over dinner to debate the big issues of the day. Democracy. Religion. Philosophy. Race. After a few swigs of schwarmerei, a mildly hallucinogenic local brew, they always land on the same topic: women. Or, more precisely, the inferiority of women. Women have smaller brains. They are further back on the evolutionary scale. They ought not have rights. Their bodies belong to men. Of course, women are absent from the conversation. They are all but absent from the book.

Olga Tokarczuk’s novel engages with Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. Credit: Supplied

Tokarczuk clearly revels in this pompous misogynist buffoonery, lampooning the kinds of ideas that were rife among the so-called intelligentsia of Mann’s time, and found particular currency with the dawn of psychoanalysis. It never feels mean-spirited, though, and, with the current state of the world, remains depressingly relevant.

In the ill-conceived but nonetheless assured pontifications spouted over substandard food, you’ll find the kind of thinking that underpinned the overturning of Roe v Wade and continues to be repeated in talking points by MAGA loyalists in the lead-up to the American election. Ditto the dick-swinging toxic masculinity pushing geopolitics ever further to the right.

While the misogynist thought-orgy alone might have been horror enough to earn The Empusium its subtitle, there are some old-school pant-wetting scares at play, too.

Strange things have been happening in Gorbesdorf; things that Tokarczuk teases with ominous flashes. Dead toads. A decapitated duck, strung up like Mussolini from a baking ring. And, in the forest, life-sized female dummies called tutschi, made from sticks, moss and other rotting detritus. Used to relieve the sexual urges of the local villagers, they may well be the embodiment of malevolent spirits – the otherwise absent women, spurned as witches.

Here, Tokarczuk ramps up the genre pastiche, with genuinely terrifying undertones of The Blair Witch Project and the films of M. Night Shyamalan. But it is to Shirley Jackson, the greatest feminist horror writer of all time, that Tokarczuk most knowingly tips her hat.

Wojnicz learns that each November a man is violently killed in the forest. It’s a sacrifice of sorts to an unknown beast that was once satisfied with a local shepherd or charcoal burner, but had recently acquired the taste for patients from the sanatorium. The doctors usually rig the lottery, but the poor guy they were about to offer up just died of natural causes.

One needn’t be a scholar of early 20th-century literature, nor a late-night penny dreadful fan to absolutely delight in what The Empusium has to offer. Having endured The Books of Jacob with reluctant admiration, I was in thrall to this from the first page.

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No moment unmediated, the extinction of experience mourns the loss of making analog memories.

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Twenty-five years ago, books critiquing the internet were rare. I had written The Soul in Cyberspace in 1997 to warn about the internet’s downsides and dangers, but because so much was so new and so promising, most other books on the topic heralded new possibilities the internet could achieve for evangelism, education, and business. In the last 15 years, however, our immersion in online life has sparked several trenchant critiques, such as Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows (2011), which demonstrated that too much screen time reconfigures our brains, making us intellectually impatient.

Now Christine Rosen, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, has given us The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World (W.W. Norton, 272 pp.). The book offers a keen analysis premised on the claim that our technologies often impoverish our lives without our noticing it. She warns that “we are embracing a way of living in which there are increasingly few areas where we don’t live our lives through these technologies and conform to the behaviors the technologies are designed to encourage.” We become habituated to lives mediated by screens and algorithms and fail to notice their effects on our very humanity.

For example, the uniquely human endeavor of handwriting a card, note, or letter has been replaced by texting, which is impersonal and usually perfunctory. A handwritten card or note expresses the writer’s unique penmanship and choice of ink and stationery; it occupies physical space as a discrete object and is mailed from one place to another. Unlike emails and texts, a handwritten card or letter is easily kept as a memento. I write at least one or two cards a week on carefully chosen cards that feature artwork I appreciate. My goal is that the recipients will keep my cards and hark back to them as something worth remembering.

Laptops allow students to take voluminous notes (when they aren’t succumbing to online distractions), but several studies indicate that old-school note-taking by hand is better for deeper learning. The students are more likely to look at the teacher and other students and to attend to their words. Although Rosen does not write much about it, putting education online, either in real time (synchronously) or in a prerecorded form (asynchronously), removes the face-to-face element so central to teaching and learning. Instead of humans being together in a room dedicated to learning, education is largely reduced to distributing information, and is thereby impoverished.

Rosen is secular and only glancingly addresses the extinction of experience for the Church, but we can apply her concerns to online church services or to churches that broadcast sermons from one location to other locations or sites. Of course, it is impossible to have Communion or practice baptism online, and removing the preacher from the physical congregation (as with multisite churches) diminishes the pastoral presence.

Rosen notes that the cell phone’s ability to photograph our experiences removes us from experiencing where we are. Many who attend art museums are more concerned to photograph the paintings and quickly move on than to behold them without mediation and at leisure. Communication technologies are always entertaining us so that the reception of art as art becomes difficult. Rosen writes: “Art demands something from us. Entertainment does not; we seek out entertainment to give something to us.” Our technologies make it difficult for us to enjoy worthwhile artistic experiences.

Worse yet, the desire to capture images on cell phones to post online has caused people to withhold help from those in dire conditions, resulting in their deaths. And how many car accidents are caused by drivers texting while driving?

Rosen does not mention it, but another technology cheapens our experience of literature. Anthony Lane’s May New Yorker piece, “Can You Read a Book in a Quarter of an Hour?” critiques a popular app called Blinklist that summarizes books through an algorithm. Instead of laboring through a long and challenging book, you can pay to have it digested into a fraction of its size. But what is lost?

These insights are marred, however, by Rosen’s Darwinitus (to use Raymond Tallis’ term). She repeatedly appeals to evolutionary history to ground her critique, but this worldview yields no intrinsic value for human beings nor can it provide any models for virtue, since nature without God is but an impersonal and materialistic system with no purpose or design. Still, Rosen prizes our distinctively human experiences (except worship) and offers tools to detect how technology can undermine them.

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Modern, young religious life demystified in 'For Love of the Broken Body'

(Unsplash/Kenny Eliason)

by Bethany Welch

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Julia Walsh's  For Love of the Broken Body: A Spiritual Memoir is a raw account of her early years preparing to become a Catholic sister. Walsh begins the book with the chilling story of a terrible accident that occurs in the first month of her novitiate. (Those who are less familiar with religious life might consider starting with the glossary at the back.) She makes a short visit to her family's ancestral farmland soon after beginning the period of prayer and study required of those seeking to profess vows in an institute or order of Catholic religious.

Seeking a quiet place to pray and journal, Walsh heads toward a scenic overlook. The bucolic setting stands in sharp contrast to the challenging months of fracture and mending that lie ahead for her when the ground gives way, and she lands face down in a shallow stream far below. This portion of Walsh's tale unfolds at a rapid clip, punctuated by short, descriptive sentences that spare no details. "My tongue feels jagged teeth. I taste mucus and blood," Walsh writes.

Sr. Julia Walsh is a Franciscan Sister of Perpetual Adoration. (CNS/Courtesy of Sr. Julia Walsh)

She then pivots from detailing the broken bones and wounds she suffered to sketch out how she came to be on the bluff that day. Her early college years, youthful experiences of church, a close-knit family and a burgeoning desire to experience more of God all bring her first to a year of service with an intentional community; and, soon after, to exploring what it would be like to be a Catholic sister.

Just as she recounted her injuries, hospitalization and healing, Walsh similarly spares no detail of her inner struggle to be seen and valued by men. Prior to religious life, this grappling lands in the arena of the commonplace, the stuff of paperback novels and Top 40 songs. However, once Walsh begins the discernment process for religious life, which will culminate in professing vows that include celibate chastity, the context for this grappling changes.

Memoirs can normalize common human experiences, or give the reader a peek behind the curtain of a closed world or insular system. The former is likely to be the draw for many of those who pick up  For Love of the Broken Body . Walsh's story gives shape to questions such as: What is it like to be a "nun" in the 21st century? What happens when you are preparing to commit to a life without individual attachments and meet someone you could see yourself marrying? How does someone in discernment handle doubts about making a lifelong commitment to a unique way of being?

With zeal and a hearty dose of humility, Walsh discloses her innermost thoughts. She writes ecstatically of her hunger for Christ and a longing for union. Sometimes, that union is metaphysical or spiritual, in others, it is decidedly physical. She imagines what would occur in a sexual encounter with a man she has fantasized about for many years. Some might be startled at what they hear in the context of religious life. Other readers, perhaps seasoned by their own experience of being human, will recognize the innate desire to be seen, to be touched, to be held, to share an intimate connection — desires from which Catholic religious are not excluded.

Given its themes,  For Love of the Broken Body might find a place on the bookshelf next to  Redeemed: Stumbling Toward God, Sanity, and the Peace That Passes All Understanding ;  Accidental Saints: Finding God in All the Wrong People ;  Wild Mercy: Living the Fierce and Tender Wisdom of the Women Mystics ; River of Fire: My Spiritual Journey ; and Cloistered: My Years as a Nun . All six memoirs by women trace threads of spiritual awakening and interior movement amid the very real messiness of human bodies, religious institutions, desire, grief and pain.

While similarly candid, authors Heather King, Nadia Bolz-Weber, Mirabai Starr, Sr. Helen Prejean and Catherine Coldstream spend more pages on the integration of lessons learned through this sacred/profane dichotomy than Walsh does. This is unfortunate. Presumably, there is much more to say post-vow profession when the commitments take on real flesh in day-to-day living. One might imagine Walsh having many more experiences of loving and being loved that exist within the framework of the vows, and thus deepening and widening her understanding of agape.

Walsh does a fine job of explaining the many features of Catholic women religious and the nature of an apostolic calling (versus cloistered contemplatives). She illuminates the necessity of being companioned in discernment by wise formators who can situate the doubts and questions of the young into the larger story of a long life. Ultimately, one concludes  For Love of the Broken Body with the sense that Walsh is authentically and truly herself, something that people of all faith backgrounds and experiences can appreciate.

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