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Computing as sugar? The sweet and the bitter of social histories of computing

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Computing as sugar? The sweet and the bitter of social histories of computing Janet Abbate and Stephanie Dick (eds.), Abstractions and Embodiments: New Histories of Computing and Society Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022. Pp. 472. ISBN 978-1-4214-4437-6. $39.95 (paperback).

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 August 2024

Jonnie Penn
Jonnie Penn*
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge and Harvard University
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Extract

In 2005, year of the first YouTube upload, historian of science Michael Mahoney argued, ‘Whereas other technologies may be said to have a nature of their own and thus to exercise some agency in their design, the computer has no such nature.’1 In the next breath, Mahoney argued that the computer does have a nature, but that it is ‘protean’ and ‘what we make of it’.2 To a student born in 2005, now exiting young adulthood into a world of some 14 trillion or more YouTube videos (many of which, no doubt, inform their education), this claim may sound strange. The computer is … what … we … make of it? A curious student might squint. Who are ‘we’? Did he mean historians? Workers? Women?

Type
Essay Review
Information
The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 57 , Issue 3 , September 2024 , pp. 479 - 483
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of British Society for the History of Science

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References

1 Mahoney, Michael S., ‘The histories of computing(s)’, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews (2005) 30(2), pp. 119–35, 122CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Mahoney, op. cit. (1), p. 122.

3 Nooney, Laine, The Apple II Age (Chicago: University Chicago Press, 2023)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Kosseff, Jeff, The Twenty-Six Words That Created the Internet, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Mullaney, Thomas S., Peters, Benjamin, Hicks, Mar and Philip, Kavita (eds.), Your Computer Is on Fire, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2021CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Yost, Jeffrey and Diaz, Gerardo Con, Just Code, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press (forthcoming)Google Scholar; Haigh, Thomas and Ceruzzi, Paul E., A New History of Modern Computing, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2021CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ali, Syed Mustafa, Dick, Stephanie, Dillon, Sarah, Jones, Matthew L., Penn, Jonnie and Staley, Richard (eds.), Histories of Artificial Intelligence: A Genealogy of Power, BJHS Themes 8 (2023)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.