Expertise Articles, Technological Information
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, two additional developments enforced the hierarchy. First, the definition of a clear category of ‘fine arts’ break up aesthetic creativity away from the mere craft abilities of the mechanical arts. Second, the connection of ‘science’ to business was subject to appreciable boundary work as scientists and engineers professionalized. Yet even for a current English word ‘technology’ has come to embrace usually conflicting meanings. First, I will offer a abstract of Eric Schatzberg’s important new opus Technology, which untangles and clarifies the history of ‘technology’ and its cognates as actors’ categories. So ‘technology’ entered the 20 th century because the science of the commercial arts, a time period of art for the German cameralists and a brand-like placeholder term in the United States. Yet in the end the German idea of Technik would have much higher influence. After 1850 German engineers embraced the time period Technik in a broad s...