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Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences by Edward Tenner (Paperback, 1997)
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Product Information
Techlogy has made us healthier and wealthier, but we aren't necessarily happier in our zealously engineered surroundings. Edward Tenner is a conisseur of what he calls revenge effects - the unintended, ironic consequences of the mechanical, chemical, biological, and medical forms of ingenuity that have been hallmarks of the progressive, improvement-obsessed twentieth century. In seeking out these revenge effects, he ranges far and wide in our cultural landscape to discover an insistent pattern of paradox that implicates everything from black lung to bluebirds, wooden tennis rackets to Windows 95. His insatiable curiosity embraces techlogy in all its guises: televised competitive skiing, which is much less exciting w that state-of-the-art cameras have eliminated the blur and lost motion of older broadcasts; low-tar cigarettes, which may encourage smokers to defer quitting altogether; justified margins, which became de rigueur just as psychologists and typographers were realizing that uneven right-hand edges are both more legible and more attractive; the meltdown at Cherbyl, which occurred during a test of enhanced safety procedures; and much, much more. While Tenner is fascinated by these phemena in their own right, Why Things Bite Back is t merely a compendium of techlogical perversities. There is a historical and, indeed, ethical agenda behind his new look at the obvious. After all, Murphy's Law as originally uttered by a frustrated military engineer was meant t as a fatalistic, defeatist principle but as a call for alertness and adaptation. Tenner heartily concurs. Things do go wrong, with a vengeance, and assigning cause can be as tricky as unscrambling an egg.Reducing revenge effects demands substituting brains for stuff - deintensifying our quest for more, better, faster, in favor of finesse. And in Tenner's estimation, humanity is perfectly capable of this adjustment.Product Identifiers
PublisherRandom House USA Inc, Vintage Books
ISBN-100679747567
ISBN-139780679747567
eBay Product ID (ePID)183736606
Product Key Features
SubjectScience: General & Référence
LanguageEnglish
TypeTextbook
AuthorEdward Tenner
FormatPaperback
Additional Product Features
Date of Publication01/10/1997
Place of PublicationNew York
Country of PublicationUnited States
Author BiographyEdward Tenner, former executive editor for physical science and history at Princeton University Press, holds a visiting research appointment in the Department of Geological and Geophysical Sciences at Princeton University. He received the A.B. from Princeton and the Ph.D. in history from the University of Chicago and has held visiting research positions at Rutgers University and the Institute for Advanced Study. In 1991-92 he was a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellow and in 1995-96 is a Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. From the Hardcover edition.
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