How Machines Make History, and how Historians (And Others) Help Them to Do So

If machines make history, they do so only with the assistance of others. For the most part, machines are mute and illiterate, and it is historians (and others) who decide the extent to which technology acts as an independent force to shape history. Vacillating between Marx and Mumford, historians, philosophers, and sociologists writing on technology in the last ten years have reached no consensus on technological determinism. Of the fields reviewed here, philosophers of technology are the most enthusiastic advocates of technological determinism. Business historians who emphasize technology's determining role in shaping modern business structures define one pole of historical writing; labor historians who detail workers' capabilities to blunt, transform, or even reject managers' efforts to introduce new technologies define the other pole. Urban, physical science, and technological historians hold intermediate positions. Recently, historians as well as sociologists of technology have taken steps to achieve the difficult feat of showing technology at once as socially constructed and society-shaping. On one level, this essay aims to identify patterns in these literatures. But disciplinary patterns are not the whole story. principal argument is that those historians (and others) adopting a macro perspective are the ones who allow technology a causal role in historical change. They deploy the Machine to make history. This causal role for the Machine is not present and is not possible in studies adopting a micro perspective. The single most influential theory of the relationship between technology and society is 'technological determinism,' write MacKenzie and Wajc-