Re-Newing Old Technologies: Astonishment, Second Nature, and the Uncanny in Technology from the Previous Turn-of-the Century

Old and New: The General Line from Amazement to HabitWhat can we learn from a cultural history of technology?Beyond chronicling the development, introduction and proliferation of specific technologies, what can we learn from investigating, to use Carolyn Marvin's revealing phrase, the time "when old technologies were new"?1 Teclmology in the modern age has a direct relation to the phenomenon of innovation and novelty, and therefore to what makes the modern age rnodern.To imagine an old technology as something that was once new means, therefore, to try to recapture a quality it has lost.It means examining a technology or device at 1e point of introduction, before it has become part of a nearly invisible everyday life ofhabit and routine.But it also must mean examining this move from dazzling appearance to nearly transparent utility, from the spectacular and astonishing to the convenient and unremarkable.This transformation needs to be interrogated for the cultural myths of modernity it assumes and creates.The move from astonishment to a habitual second nature may be less stable than we think, and this instability may explain our fascination with rediscovering technology at its point of novelty.This essay, then, is perhaps more intimately involved with novelty than with technology, or rather with 1e intersection between them.History deals not only with events but, primarily, and some would claim exclusively, with the discourses they generate and which record them.The introduction of new technology in the modern era employs a number of rhetorical tropes and discursive practices that constitute our richest source for excavating what the newness of technology entailed.The Universal Expositions that mark the latter part of the nineteenth and the early part of the twentieth centuries celebrated, represented and explained the agents and effects of the modern world.Their visual displays and verbal proclamations, protocols and practices, announced key aspects of modernity: an overcoming of space and time that allowed a new sense of the global in a world shrunken by new technologies of transportation and