BlackHat's Journal: Cheap book review

MIT Press link The Intellectual Appropriation of Technology Discourses on Modernity, 1900-1939 Hård and Andrew Jamison (Eds.)

but first the cartoon...
Flash animation: Sequence of sprites of each of the Whitehouse staff steps out a doorway marked Whitehouse Infirmary. Each with a cast on their foot guided out by a nurse who repeats the line: "Avoid heavy activity and try not to release any new trial balloons for a week or two, ok?"

I had picked up [TIAOT] as it was both 75% off and the title struck me as an oxymoronic statement. Tech for me and I expect many if not most of the people here at /. make little distinction between: Wet-Ware, software, instructions, manuals, howtos, and the Hardware. In most cases there never was a clean break between the areas when the "object/process" was designed by its creator. Only in a few areas in this discourse do the authors mention this and in many cases fail to make the connection. A fine example of this is in the section "Swedish Grandeur" in which they pick a quote about boys (Danish and Swedish) and how they might work with a given machine. The writer tries to make a point about the national character of each as a social statement about the nature of employees in each country. The idea that social forces are at work in how a worker might react to a new method is not with out a number of giant assumptions. One that all workers will have access to information and have the skills to correctly identify the problem (is this item new/different enough to break the traditional framework). Does the worker even have the permission to go further than just operating the equipment etc.

All in all the work is well layed out and never bogs down in details irrelevant to their point. Well worth the $6.75(canadian) I paid for it.