Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Preface
- 1 Resistance to new technology and its effects on nuclear power, information technology and biotechnology
- PART I Conceptual issues
- 2 The crisis of ‘Progress’
- 3 Reinterpreting ‘Luddism’: resistance to new technology in the British Industrial Revolution
- 4 The changeability of public opinions about new technology: assimilation effects in attitude surveys
- 5 ‘Technophobia’: a misleading conception of resistance to new technology
- PART II Case studies
- PART III International comparisons
- PART IV Comparisons of different technologies
- PART V Afterword
- Index
5 - ‘Technophobia’: a misleading conception of resistance to new technology
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 July 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Preface
- 1 Resistance to new technology and its effects on nuclear power, information technology and biotechnology
- PART I Conceptual issues
- 2 The crisis of ‘Progress’
- 3 Reinterpreting ‘Luddism’: resistance to new technology in the British Industrial Revolution
- 4 The changeability of public opinions about new technology: assimilation effects in attitude surveys
- 5 ‘Technophobia’: a misleading conception of resistance to new technology
- PART II Case studies
- PART III International comparisons
- PART IV Comparisons of different technologies
- PART V Afterword
- Index
Summary
In the history of technology the concept of ‘technophobia’ seems to undergo a periodical revival to deal with people's reactions to innovations. This tendency to detect symptoms of pathology in people's experience of new technologies reappears in public debates. According to the historian Goffi (1988) we may distinguish a universal from a particular form of technophobia. Universal ‘phobia’ is expressed in ancient myths such as Prometheus, The Golem, Dr Faustus or the Greek notion of Hybris. The particular form is the anti-scientific attitudes in the recent industrial age. Often technophobia is part of the larger concept of ‘neophobia’ which refers to people's general aversion against all things new.
In the nineteenth century, ‘Siderodromophobia’ subsumed adverse reactions to railway work and railway journeys: fever in the aftermath of journeys; the ‘delirium furiosum’, a mental agitation caused by the mere sight of a locomotive steaming by; and a hysterical aversion to work among locomotive and wagon personnel (Fischer-Homberger 1975, pp. 40f). Mitchell (1984) reports how at times the nuclear debate in the USA was conducted under the heading of ‘nuclear phobia’: images of nuclear power, spread by the media, touch on unconscious motivations, and give rise to an emotional over-reaction which brought the nuclear power industry to a virtual stop.
To use the notion of ‘phobia’ to describe people's experience of and behaviour towards new technology is pragmatically not neutral; the psychopathological classification presents the problem through the ‘clinical’ eye.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Resistance to New TechnologyNuclear Power, Information Technology and Biotechnology, pp. 97 - 122Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1995
- 9
- Cited by