I’m right now in the process of developing a graduate reading course, with my students Dima and Erik, on the foundational thinking around technology and society, so it was opportune that a note about this book just floated in on my never-ending river of email. The book is a collection interviews in which the same five questions were posed to many of the leading thinkers in the philosophical and sociological study of technology. It’s an excellent list of people (ready? Joseph Agassi, Mario Bunge, Harry Collins, Albert Borgmann, Paul Durbin, Andrew Feenberg, Joan H. Fujimura, Peter Galison, Allan Hanson, Donna J. Haraway, N. Katherine Hayles, Don Ihde, Ian C. Jarvie, Bruno Latour, Bill McKibben, Carl Mitcham, Andrew Pickering, Daniel Sarewitz, Dan A. Seni, Peter Singer, Susan Leigh Star, Lucy Suchman, and Isabelle Stengers.) And, the questions are provocative:

1. Why were you initially drawn to philosophical issues concerning technology?

2. What does your work reveal about technology that other academics, citizens, or engineers typically fail to appreciate?

3. What, if any, practical and/or social-political obligations follow from studying technology from a philosophical perspective?

4. If the history of ideas were to be narrated in such a way as to emphasize technological issues, how would that narrative differ from traditional accounts?

5. With respect to present and future inquiry, how can the most important philosophical problems concerning technology be identified and explored?

I won’t dub this “required reading” yet, because I haven’t read it all. But I just spent some time on the website for this book, which offers excerpts from one answer from each of the scholars. The writing is of a refreshingly high quality, and is lush with insights.

Curiously, my two favorite comments are not about technology at all, but about academia. The first comes from Susan Leigh Star, who notes the way that academic scholarship so regularly fails to allow attention to the marginal, the personal, the frail, and leaves us with philosophies of technology that remain distant from real human experience. She gives these academic techniques amusing names, one of which is

the Wall of Infinite Sequels. Such as “in future work we hope to extend this analysis to include such important issues as context, affect, and a more qualitative expansion of the independent variable, inequality.” Or “It was beyond the scope of this study to include more variety in the sampling framework, such as women, minorities, or pay rates. Too much variability in the independent variables managed here would have produced a combinatorial explosion.”

The second is from Bruno Latour. In response to question two, he balks at the idea that he has revealed anything to anyone, in part because we’re all so unwilling to see the complex entanglements of the technological and social elements of our world — but mostly because academics are intellectual troglodytes:

Academics, as a rule fail to appreciate so many things, that it is hard to know where to start! There is this near impossibility with modernism and modernists in general to be sensitive to what is given in experience that baffles me. There are still people who fret in sociology, anthropology and may be philosophy, because in my definition of techniques “I give a role to non humans”… and they pronounce this sentence as if they were saying “Latour is a pervert, a zoophile” or something of the sort. So we have been connected, attached, folded with non-humans for millions of years, and especially for the last three centuries, and it would come as a surprise for academics?! How strange. In my experience, academics live in a world that still predates all the industrial and technical revolutions. They are sort of upper paleolithic – and even that is unfair because in that time they had already lots of stones… and when you see the way philosophers treat stones, it is not encouraging…