The course “A General History of Technology” was already taught once last year, and I had already written a detailed course summary at the time (see here). This semester the second run has just ended, and one could say that the course has gradually entered the right track.
At the end of the first year, 29 students had enrolled; this year, after withdrawals were deducted, there were 69 students. It has finally grown somewhat larger. I hope the students will tell ten people, ten people will tell a hundred, and that next year the number of enrollments will rise again~
Final Exam
Let me begin with the final exam. This time I removed the attendance question; all the questions were open-ended essay questions. As usual, it was completely open-book, and students were allowed to bring computers and look up materials online.
For this exam I made use of my teaching assistant to share the workload, letting him be responsible for composing the questions and grading the papers. He drafted more than a dozen questions, from which I selected six, with slight wording adjustments, and added last year’s first two questions, forming a set of eight questions. Students were asked to choose any four and answer them; the exam lasted two hours and was taken in class.
In the future I will continue this practice: the final exam will be written and graded by the teaching assistant. Of course, after the grading is done I will review it myself, focusing in particular on the papers with the highest and lowest scores, as well as those of the students whose essays were the best and worst. My actual impression after looking through them is that the assistant’s grading is generally reliable; there are a few individual cases where it differs slightly from my own sense, but not by much. Open-ended essay questions inevitably contain an element of subjectivity; whether graded by the assistant or by me personally, absolute objectivity is impossible. After all, luck is also part of one’s ability.
A new phenomenon appeared in this exam, namely that four students were absent. In theory, arranging the last class as an in-class exam should make absences unlikely, because those chronic truants who skip class all year would at least show up for the final class, and those who had not been skipping class before should, given my repeated reminders in class about the exam arrangements, have had even less reason to be absent. Yet in a class of fewer than 70 students, there were in fact 4 absentees, which really took me by surprise.
One student had not been coming to class all year and simply failed; another dropped the course for personal reasons, but the other two had merely “forgotten.”
I made an exception and decided to allow the absent students to make up the exam at home, answering the questions themselves, because the questions were all open-ended and students could also go online during the exam, so the actual conditions were not very different. Of course, being absent is an extremely serious lapse, so I stipulated that absent students would first have 20 points deducted from their written score.
As it turned out, the assistant’s summary said that their answers were all very poor. They clearly had far more time to answer the questions, and they could also type on a computer, but judged purely by the length of their answers, the make-up exam students displayed a very perfunctory attitude. One of them was still passable, but the other really could not be saved, and in the end I still failed him.
In addition, the issue of international students has recently become a hot topic, and I am also very displeased with the absurdly high待遇 and extremely low requirements that Chinese universities generally extend to international students. In general, I treat international students and ordinary students alike, but at times I do show some leniency; this does not mean I am especially lenient toward international students. Depending on the circumstances, I may also be lenient with ordinary students. For example, on this final exam paper, the assistant felt that the papers of two international students did not quite reach passing level, but out of leniency he gave them 60 points, and I respected the assistant’s choice. The key is the student’s attitude. If a student submitted the final assignment on time and did not plagiarize, and was fairly认真, then I can forgive the weakness shown during the live exam because of language ability. Of course, such forgiveness has its limits: at most I will raise a 50-point level to 60, but if it is truly too terrible, it still cannot pass.
The assistant graded very carefully; he even wrote a few comments on each question for every student. I reproduce below his overall summary:
Final Exam Grading Summary Written by the Teaching Assistant (Yao Yu)
This exam was scheduled for 69 students, and 65 were present. Four students were absent; after the exam, two students participated in a make-up exam. Before summarizing the specific answers to each question, let me first say a few words about several recurring issues in the students’ answer formats during this exam.
First is the issue of understanding the form of the questions. At the beginning of the exam paper, it was stated very clearly that this was an “open-ended essay question” exam. But unfortunately, many students did not read the questions carefully and did not answer in the mode of an essay question. A considerable number of students (about ten or so) answered in the mode of short-answer questions, writing only five or six lines for each question, merely listing their views briefly without developing an argument or citing any relevant materials. There were also a few students who understood “essay” as meaning they should write miscellaneous prose: they chatted at length in a free-associative manner about their understanding of the questions, and even used the questions as a springboard to judge some social phenomena. But this is not serious argumentation; the fact that there is no standard answer does not mean one can write however one likes.
Second is the attitude toward the knowledge from the course. Most students still followed the requirements and combined course knowledge in their answers, or used the reading materials assigned in class. But there was also a considerable number of students who did not combine their answers with the course knowledge. In the middle of the questions, the paper stated: “It is recommended that you answer by combining what you have learned and read in the course, but you may disagree with the teacher’s views.” The premise of this recommendation is that students have studied the course this semester in a solid way, or at least have some understanding of the course content this semester. At the same time, whether or not they support the teacher’s views, students should at least know what the teacher’s views are. Unfortunately, from some students’ answers, I could hardly see any trace that they had studied the course seriously this semester; their answers were entirely based on their own understanding and some online materials.
Finally, there is the question of citing sources. This exam was open-book, and online resources could even be used. But many students did not indicate the sources of the materials they cited as required. Some students, in the process of citing, only wrote “so-and-so said” or “so-and-so wrote,” or simply put the quoted content in quotation marks without listing the specific source of the citation. Moreover, as undergraduates at Tsinghua University, I believe students should possess a certain academic ability and be able to use some basic academic literature. Yet some students only cited Baidu Baike (Teacher Hu repeatedly emphasized during the exam period not to cite only Baidu Baike), which would be penalized at the grader’s discretion. It is worth mentioning that, thanks to Teacher Hu’s repeated admonitions, there was no obvious plagiarism in this exam, but some answers gave a very strong impression of being rewritten from other sources.
Below I will give a question-by-question summary of the exam performance.
1. This course has limited time, and many important things were not covered. If you were to teach one more class, which theme neglected by the teacher would you choose? Please design a lesson for “A General History of Technology,” and write down the topic, outline, approach, and highlights you would plan.
Summary: The first question was the one Teacher Hu valued most, and it also best reflects the students’ comprehensive understanding of the course. In last year’s exam, this question had the fewest takers, but this year the students clearly read Teacher Hu’s blog carefully before the exam, and the number choosing it rose sharply. In this exam, 38 students chose this question, accounting for 58.5% of the whole class.
Some students chose “biotechnology,” “film technology,” “ceramic technology,” “medical technology,” “agricultural technology,” and “musical instrument technology.” One student even combined last year’s course content and wrote on “perspective” (it can be seen that this student read Teacher Hu’s blog very carefully). Among these, the two topics “medical technology” and “agricultural technology” were still relatively in line with the course’s overall style in terms of breadth of vision. Many other students also answered from the perspective of their own majors, choosing “the chemical industry,” “architectural technology,” “nuclear energy technology,” “water conservancy technology,” “materials technology,” “aerospace technology,” and so on. Most of these answers still combined a history-of-technology perspective, but a few were too perfunctory and turned into introductions to a discipline.
In addition, some students chose current technologies such as the “new four great inventions,” “gene-editing technology,” “artificial intelligence technology,” “5G technology,” and “quantum science and technology.” But these were more often prospects for the application of these technologies, lacking a historical perspective on technology.
There were also some students who had independent thought, but whose understanding of the question was still somewhat skewed. One student chose the angles of “macro history of technology” and “micro history of technology” to discuss technology, but the argument was too grand and written in a way that was impossible to make sense of. One student wrote about “the cultural basis of the origin and development of machine systems,” but the topic was closer to the history of scientific thought, and the fields involved were far too broad. Another student chose “technology oriented toward the infinite” and “technology oriented toward the infinitesimal,” listing more than a dozen kinds of science and technology, but overall it was still science rather than technology. It strayed quite seriously from the topic, failed to understand the intention of the question, and the argument remained superficial.
I think the best way to answer this question is to combine course knowledge while also showing one’s own independent thinking based on wide reading, unfolding a vivid narrative thread from the perspective of the history of technology (in other words, to imitate Teacher Hu’s style in class). One student chose “from the eye to the telescope,” with a very clear train of thought and many relevant points from the history of science. Another chose “technology and the visualization of time and space,” nicely combining the history of technology with his or her own specialized knowledge. Yet another student chose “the toilet system” as the topic. Although unconventional in choice, it unfolded the discussion very well from a history-of-technology perspective, and the literature cited was also quite solid. These three students received the highest scores on this question.
2. What exactly is technology? Can you give a concise definition? Please explain it with historical cases.
Summary: A total of 43 students chose this question, making it the most frequently selected question and accounting for 66.2% of the class. During invigilation, I already saw many students looking up Baidu Baike. Judging from the actual answers, many students indeed cited or referred to Baidu Baike’s definition of technology.
This definition is the definition of technology given by the World Intellectual Property Organization in the 1977 edition of the Licensing Trade Manual for Use by Developing Countries (the specific content will not be quoted here). Only a very small number of students directly quoted Baidu Baike; most students treated this definition as a “target.” Those who could combine course knowledge to criticize this definition, and then offer their own definition of technology, did well. For example, some students cited Kevin Kelly’s text and argued that “technology is the existence that constitutes or changes our way of life.” Some students compared the definition from Baidu Baike, the definition from the Contemporary Chinese Dictionary, and a definition from a paper on CNKI, then compared the three definitions and concluded that “technology is experiential knowledge or tools and equipment, guided by (scientific) theory, used to understand nature or transform nature.”
Some relatively strong answers combined definitions of technology from other courses in the Department of the History of Science, such as A General History of Science and the lecture series Lectures on the History of Science and Technology, or drew on parts of the article “The Origin of Technology” on the Suixuan website, showing that these students had a grasp of the relevant intellectual background. Other students chose to define technology from the perspective of philosophy of technology, citing Heidegger, Stiegler, McLuhan, and so on. But there were not many answers that both understood these thinkers correctly and argued clearly. For instance, one student cited Heidegger’s definition that “technology is disclosure,” but had a very serious problem in his understanding of the concept of disclosure, interpreting it as “accomplishing what could not originally be accomplished.”
I think the best way to answer this question is to search online literature and compare different definitions of technology from different angles, then compare these definitions with one another. After that, one should critically formulate one’s own definition by applying the knowledge learned in the course, and explain the definition with cases from the history of technology. Some students, however, merely cited a certain definition and then argued for their agreement with it. Or they only listed and compared several definitions, while themselves merely offering an elaborate synthesis of the cited definitions, lacking clarity and concision. This reveals that some students lacked in-depth reflection on the question, and also had a mistaken understanding of the task.
3. Compared with Western civilization, ancient China had a distinctive technological culture. Please try to compare the history of technology in China and the West, and discuss the commonalities and differences in invention and application among different ancient civilizations.
Summary: A total of 24 students chose this question, accounting for 36.9% of the class, making it one of the least chosen questions in this exam. The comparison of Chinese and Western technological civilizations is a topic that has been extensively discussed in Chinese academic circles, and there are a great many relevant materials online, so some conclusions have basically already been formed. For the person answering the question, then, the most important task is to distinguish the quality of the materials and to further interpret them; this is also an important basis for scoring.
Liu Wenrui’s Comparative Study of the History of Science and Technology in China and the West, Fu Jianqiu’s A New Interpretation of the Comparative Level of Ancient Chinese and Western Science and Technology, and Teacher Yao Dazhi’s paper On a Model of Ancient Chinese Technological History from a Global Perspective were among the most frequently cited works. Most students compared the two from the perspectives of geographical factors and political factors (some also framed it as the difference between agrarian civilization and maritime civilization). But there were great differences in the specific argumentative process: some students were able to combine the literature with the course knowledge of the history of technology, put forward their own views, and explain them with cases. Others merely summarized the views in the literature in a cursory way, lacking their own reflection. In addition, a few students’ citations were not sufficiently规范; although there was no obvious plagiarism, there was some suspicion of rewritten material.
4. Some people say that today we are in the period of the “Fourth Industrial Revolution.” What do you think of such claims? What exactly is an “industrial revolution”? Please briefly state your understanding of the concept of “industrial revolution,” combining it with the history of technology.
Summary: A total of 37 students chose this question. In the specific answers, most students believed that we have not yet entered the “Fourth Industrial Revolution,” and some cited cases from the history of technology to argue that the Third Industrial Revolution has not yet ended. There was also one student who used Nicholas Davis’s article “Understanding the Fourth Industrial Revolution Through Five Dimensions” to argue that “only the First Industrial Revolution was an industrial revolution in the true sense; the subsequent major breakthroughs were all continuations and supplements to it.” At the same time, a small number of students believed that we are already in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. One student, in answering, connected Germany’s “Industry 4.0” and China’s “Made in China 2025” industrial development plans, explaining his or her view from the perspective of science and technology policy. In the grading process, as long as the viewpoint was clear and the argument reasonable, there was no difference in score between the two positions.
From the overall answer quality this time, as soon as a definition was involved, it entered the “hard-hit area” of Baidu Baike citations. If relevant discussions appeared in the course slides, many students were also willing to “directly quote” the slide content into their own answers. This may be because students are always trying to seek an accurate standard answer. The Industrial Revolution is a key topic in this semester’s course, but as Teacher Hu said in last year’s final exam summary, even if one cites the views hinted at by the teacher in the slides, “if you do not listen in class or think, and only look at a few fragments on the PPT, it is very hard to organize a smooth logic.” In the grading process, it was obvious that some students were simply forcing things together, awkwardly piecing together the text from the slides. Therefore, for this question, the degree to which the classroom knowledge was mastered and the logical coherence of the argument were the criteria for scoring.
5. Telegraph has been likened to the “Victorian Internet.” Please compare the significance and impact of the telegraph and the Internet, and discuss your understanding of this metaphor.
Summary: A total of 37 students chose this question on this exam. In terms of reading the question correctly, the right approach was, first, to discuss separately, in relation to the history of technology, the “significance and impact” of these two technologies—the telegraph and the Internet—and only then to compare them. But many students still had problems understanding the question. Some wrote it in the style of a short-answer question, listing three or four similarities and differences and finishing it in a few sentences. Others turned it into a free-form essay, proposing views such as “the telegraph connects people point to point, while the Internet connects people face to face,” and citing literary materials like One Hundred Years of Solitude and The Stars Shine Over Us. One can see that the writers had read widely and possessed a certain literary flair, but they were far off topic. There was also one student who left a particularly deep impression: the question asked them to “discuss your understanding of this metaphor,” which meant comparing the telegraph and the Internet as two technologies, but this student instead discussed, from a literary angle throughout, the relation between tenor and vehicle in the metaphor. Such an answer was truly equal parts laughable and exasperating.
Most students did still connect the question with course knowledge, and realized that it came from The Victorian Internet, one of the supplementary readings recommended by the instructor in class; this book was also, apart from the slides and the instructor’s blog, the most frequently cited source. Some students, while engaging with course material, also combined it with perspectives from communication studies and media philosophy, showing a relatively deep understanding of the course content.
6. Based on cases from the history of technology, discuss your understanding of the relationship between technology and art.
Summary: 60 students chose this question, accounting for 62% of the total. This was an open-ended question with a great many possible angles of answer. Most students combined it with cases from the history of technology discussed in class, looked up relevant literature, and then developed their own understanding. Photography and perspective were the historical cases chosen by the vast majority of students; one student also chose to use part of the “glass” unit as a point of entry. In addition, several students chose cases such as electronic music, computer vision art, and “technological aesthetics” in the engineering design of electronic products, though the quality of the discussion varied.
As for references, A Brief Discussion of the Relationship Between Art and Technology and An Analysis of the Problem of Technology and Art were the sources most frequently cited by students (these two texts rank near the top in CNKI searches). But when using literature, students still tended merely to summarize and classify the views in the texts, lacking their own critical thinking in combination with course content. What is worth praising is that several students cited Mumford’s texts and Heidegger’s later writings on technology and art, showing that they already possessed a very good vision integrating philosophy of technology and the history of technology. In addition, two students from the Academy of Arts combined a great deal of art-historical knowledge in answering this question. Although this was slightly “off topic,” it did indeed provide a new perspective.
Because this question was relatively open-ended, many students again had problems with reading the question properly and answered in the form of a rambling essay or prose piece. One student proposed the view that “technology can become art,” but in the course of the discussion got bogged down in what counts as “art” and what counts as “technology,” neither clarifying the question nor engaging with cases from the history of technology. Another student argued that “technology tends toward the material and objective, whereas art tends toward the spiritual and subjective,” using Leonardo da Vinci and blue-and-white porcelain as examples, claiming that the former uses art to create technology while the latter uses technology to create art. The student wrote at great length, but the result was utterly baffling. Rather regrettably, one student answered from the standpoint of some views by Professor Wu Guosheng, taking “the common origins of technology and art” as the basis for the answer. But this student did not combine the answer with most of the material from the history of technology, and instead focused mainly on Greek etymology analysis (one can see that he really did learn some Greek), completely going off topic.
7. In the Marvel film Black Panther, a fictional African country called Wakanda is created. In the film’s setting, this country disguises itself as a poor, backward, landlocked agricultural country in central Africa, but in fact possesses many high technologies far beyond the level of the era, while culturally and politically still maintaining the form of a primitive tribe. The development of technology is bound to involve many social factors. In light of the history of technology knowledge learned this semester, do you think such a Wakanda could exist in the real world? Why?
Summary: 31 students chose this question, accounting for 47.7% of the total. Although this question mentioned the currently popular Marvel film, the key point was already made explicit in the wording: “The development of technology is bound to involve many social factors.” In other words, this question tested students’ understanding of an issue repeatedly addressed in the course: “How does the development of technology affect culture and society?” The vast majority of students correctly grasped the intention of the question, combined it with cases from the history of technology, and answered from three aspects: political institutions, economic structure, and culture (some students answered only from two aspects: political institutions and social culture). On this basis, most students concluded that Wakanda could not exist in real life. In the process of argumentation, some students cited the views of philosophers such as Marx, Mumford, and McLuhan, displaying a certain philosophical vision of technology. But there were also some students who did not cite any literature at all, and instead simply developed their answers in several points based on their own understanding of the issue. Although their views and line of thought were correct, there were many flaws in the argumentation process.
I remember that during invigilation, Teacher Hu also specifically emphasized that students must not post the question to Zhihu or forums and then append something like “online and waiting, kind of urgent.” Yet one student “committed the offense in the teeth of the wind,” referring in the answer to a post by the Zhihu user “One Salty Pig,” and although the source was noted, the answer was basically a summary of that post (and several others), with little personal thought. Such behavior is truly not worthy of encouragement. In addition, several students again fell into rambling mode, and their thinking was indeed very unusual. One student cited the examples of the Yuan dynasty and the Qing dynasty, arguing that a backward political system would hinder technological development, but mixed in a lot of irrelevant personal views, showing an overly narrow perspective on minority regimes. Another student compared Wakanda with Huawei, very much in step with current affairs, but indeed far too off topic.
8. According to a May 22 report on the website of Nature, the “Anthropocene Working Group” (AWG), composed of 34 members, voted this week to decide that Earth has entered a new geological epoch—the “Anthropocene.” In this vote, 29 members supported the term “Anthropocene” and agreed to take the mid-20th century as the starting point of the new era. At that time, the first atomic bomb exploded, and the radioactive debris produced became embedded in sediments and glaciers, with human activity triggering permanent geological change. In light of the knowledge learned this semester, please discuss your understanding of the event that “Earth has entered the Anthropocene” from the perspective of the history of technology.
Summary: This was the question with the fewest responses on this exam; only 12 students chose it. Although this question mentioned the currently popular concept of the Anthropocene, it was in fact aimed at the content of the twelfth lecture from Teacher Hu’s course last year, “Pollution,” namely the negative effects that technological development has brought to the environment. This question could be extended into many possible angles of answer, such as environmental protection, technological ethics, the irreversible risks embedded in modern technology, and whether the problems brought by technology can always be solved by technology itself, and so on.
But regrettably, students as a whole did not answer this question well. Perhaps because everyone was rather unfamiliar with the concept of the Anthropocene, they would instinctively go to Baidu Baike and then cite that definition in their answers. Some students also consulted online articles such as “The Biosphere, the Noosphere, and the Anthropocene” and “A New Stage in Earth’s History—the Anthropocene,” but they were basically still merely summarizing the materials, lacking their own thinking and failing to connect with course content. In addition, one student argued that “entering the Anthropocene marks humanity finally using technology to triumph over nature.” I think anyone who has read even one online article introducing the Anthropocene would not make such a claim. And this kind of overly crude technological optimism does not reflect much of the philosophy of technology and history of technology perspective Teacher Hu conveyed in this semester’s course.
Finally, a word about the two students retaking the exam. After contacting the teaching assistant, the two students who had missed the exam registered to take the make-up exam, and could submit an electronic version of the answer sheet by the evening of June 14. In other words, the make-up students had quite ample time to answer compared with the students in the regular exam, and submitting an electronic version was certainly easier than handwriting a paper. By ordinary standards, because the make-up students had first missed the exam without cause, and because their testing environment was freer, they ought to have answered the questions more carefully than the regular examinees. But regrettably, these two make-up students did not seize the opportunity well, answering in a rather hasty and perfunctory manner (their word count was even less than that of most students who wrote by hand), and basically not combining their answers with any course knowledge. The only explanation I can make of this is that these two students placed extremely little importance on this course and were also not very respectful of the teacher’s labor. The final score on the exam responded to that attitude.
Reading Notes or Essay
This assignment, as before, was a choice between reading notes or an essay, though I am thinking of adding another option next time: writing a popular-style article introducing an invention, product, figure, or era from the history of technology—in short, telling a story. The main reason is that I found that many students still do not know how to write essays. Many of the essays lack a clear argument and are more like free-form historical storytelling; worse still, some turn into mere logs of events. Since that is the case, and since our course is in any event a history course, perhaps we might as well simply allow students to “tell stories.”
For this assignment, there was only one piece that was definitively determined to be plagiarism; it was obviously assembled from fragments, and if you picked any random passage and searched it, the plagiarism would show up. Later I also used Tsinghua’s CNKI plagiarism-checking tool to verify it, and the repetition rate was close to 75%.
There was also another piece suspected of plagiarism, in which some reference books were listed at the end, but the copied sentences in the body were not marked with quotation marks or any other conspicuous formatting. Strictly speaking, of course, that counts as plagiarism, but considering that the student may simply not have known the conventions, I would usually turn a blind eye and give a low score just to let it pass. However, there was more: this near-plagiarized assignment was on biological evolution, and had nothing whatsoever to do with the history of technology. That really pushed my bottom line. After much thought, and after looking at his final exam paper, which did not seem perfunctory, and with the teaching assistant having given a relatively high score, I finally softened and let him barely pass with a total score of 60.
Assignments that have nothing to do with the course theme are not uncommon; last year I received a reading note on Thunderstorm, and it was plagiarized at that. This year was no exception. Besides the biological-evolution piece mentioned above, there was also a reading note on Schopenhauer that left a deep impression on me. If you could really read some philosophy of technology out of Schopenhauer, that would be one thing, but this student read him in a way that had nothing to do with technology or history at all. Why was such an assignment submitted to me? My bottom line was challenged again. After hesitation and more hesitation, I still passed it. (After the grades were submitted, I began to regret it, and next time I will try to harden my heart.)
But what gave me the most headaches about the assignment was late submission. I set the deadline for June 30 at 24:00, and after the deadline there were still a full 10 people who had not turned in the assignment. Several had informed me in advance, saying they would not make it for one reason or another. An experiment, an internship—actually neither is a reason. My assignment was given out at the very start of the semester; it was not suddenly assigned at the end of term. Not to mention finishing it a month early, it would not be difficult to complete it two or three weeks in advance. But I was still too soft-hearted and agreed to their delays, with the rule being that one point would be deducted for each day of delay. In the end, two lost 3 points, two lost 4 points, one lost 7 points, and one lost 11 points! Two others had already planned not to take the course, and there were still two who did not submit even by the 11th, having already reached the final deadline, basically just giving up.
The manuscripts turned in after delays were polarized: there were indeed several students who were very conscientious, and because they did not want to be perfunctory and wanted to do it properly, they submitted late. Perhaps procrastination is an occupational disease of scholars; they had already contracted this incurable illness at such a young age, and one could say they truly had scholarly talent… Of course, there were also several others who really were especially perfunctory.
Another new situation arose with this assignment: I do not know which teacher assigned a reading note on Guns, Germs, and Steel in a course last semester, and so I received more than ten assignments on that book. By the time I reached the later ones, I was already sick of seeing them. Although I did indeed recommend this book in the first few classes, it actually was not a particularly good choice, because we are after all in a course on the general history of technology, and Guns, Germs, and Steel covers such a broad range that a reading note speaking in generalities would be hard to connect with our history of technology course.
As for the overall requirements for essays and reading notes, just look at last year’s summary; I will not repeat them here.
Changes in Content
I once planned that this new course, within the next few years, should have at least one-third new content each semester. This time, I basically achieved that goal.
I merged last year’s Lectures 1 and 2 (Introduction, Neolithic Age) into Lecture 1, and last year’s three lectures on 7. Perspective, 8. Instruments and Experimental Science, and 12. Pollution were removed (they were removed to make room for new content, not because the content was unimportant or uninteresting; they may be added back in the future).
I replaced the original 10. The Industrial Revolution with 8. Railways, no longer discussing the conceptual issue of the Industrial Revolution in a dedicated way, but instead continuing the style of having one technological topic per class session.
The new topics this semester were 6. Glass; 8. Railways; 11. Electric Light; 12. Photography; 14. The Internet. Of course, the specific content of the other courses that overlapped with last year was also adjusted in small ways.
Glass is a very interesting topic. I have used it as an example both in a recent lecture and in a book I am currently writing. Glass has completely different destinies in Eastern and Western civilizations. In ancient China there was always a discontinuous tradition of glass craftsmanship, but it was mostly used to imitate jade objects; transparent glass never really developed. In the West, by contrast, transparent glass ultimately laid the foundation for the Scientific Revolution, though at the beginning it was made to cater to Westerners’ preference for crystal and wine.
The recommended book, of course, is McFarlane’s The World of Glass.
Railways are the culmination of the Industrial Revolution. Railways brought together the four technological lines of textiles, coal mining, metallurgy, and the steam engine, and also combined industrialization and urbanization, marking the phase-wise completion of the Industrial Revolution. This lesson focused on railways, but also discussed the development of the textile industry.
The recommended book is a very distinctive work on the history of technology that I recently discovered—somewhat close to what I imagine as a “history of technological thought”—which describes the transformations in thought and perception that accompanied the railway. Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century
Electric light begins with gas lamps and kerosene lamps, then moves on to electric lights before Edison, and then to the commercialization by Swan and Edison. For the significance of Edison, you can refer to this article of mine.
But I do not really have any recommended book for this part. When preparing the lesson, I mainly relied on various piecemeal articles I had read, including, of course, English Wikipedia and some English-language articles. The Chinese biographies of Edison and the like that I found were not very good.
Photography was designed in response to students’ “requests.” In the latter half of the course, I suggested that if there were any segments they especially wanted to hear, they could request them, and I would see two weeks later whether I could give a class on that topic. Both photography and the Internet were students’ requests; of course, I myself also felt that these two themes were worth a lecture.
In a certain sense, photography displaced last year’s “perspective,” and it involves the modern transformation of the world into an image, as well as the historical relationship between technology and art.
Recommended readings include Benjamin’s A Little History of Photography, and the richly illustrated introductory book The Birth of Photography.
The Internet lecture took us from ARPANET to 1995, the first year of Internet commercialization. Time was limited, so Internet 2.0 was only mentioned in passing.
I proposed that in the birth and development of the Internet, at least five forces were intertwined, each with different demands in their contest with one another: the military (control, efficiency), scholars (collaboration, sharing), hackers (freedom, challenge), businessmen (profit, advertising), and the public (socializing, games).
Returning to the first lecture’s introduction, which mentioned technology as a “thing that has not yet come into its own,” the Internet, then just coming into full bloom, is the best footnote to that idea. Technology is not completely neutral; it has its own value bias. But that value bias is by no means a monolith that, once formed, remains fixed and unchanging; rather, it is continually shaped and reconfigured in the course of development.
The recommended book is Castells’s The Rise of the Network Society.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
Leave a Reply