![[Unlocking the Air]](/unlock/perm-images/1332banner700x103.jpg "gold creek, golden ears provincial park, bc")
Nola's cleaning out the pile of things we didn't put away when we got back from Kelowna, and in the process just unearthed a book I'd started while there, The Real World of Technology by Ursula M. Franklin. I don't know if it's available outside of Canada, as it's based on the Massey Lecture Series of 1989 (and reissued with added chapters in 1999). It's certainly available from amazon.ca. (Published by Anansi Press, ISBN 0-88784-636-X)
The Massey Lectures Series is/was:
... co-sponsored by Massey College, in the University of Toronto, and CBC Radio. The series was created in honour of the Right Honourable Vincent Massey, former governor general of Canada, and was inaugurated in 1961 to enable distinguished authorities to communicate the results of original study or research on subjects of contemporary interest.
From the back cover:
Ursula M. Franklin is an experimental physicist, University Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto, a former board member of the National Research Council and the Science Council of Canada, and a companion of the Order of Canada. She has been awarded honourary degrees by more than ten Canadian universities.
A google search turned up this page, a short article with pic of her accepting the Pearson Peace Medal. So she's not slowed down.
Without getting into the nuts & bolts of the book yet, as I haven't finished it, I will say that it is both dense and highly readable, a combination not often found. Dr. Franklin examines definitions, origins and practical applications of both Technology and technologies, and most especially processes and permutations of those processes throughout everyday life. She discusses the ways and means of doing things which we take for granted as being inevitable or immutable, how they developed as they did, and how things might look if they were done differently, with more attention paid to the desired results rather than the available tools.
The following is from the beginning of the first chapter/lecture:
As I see it, technology has built the house in which we all live. The house is continually being extended and remodelled. More and more of human life take place within its walls, so that today there is hardly any human activity that does not occur within this house. All are affected by the design of the house, by the division of its space, by the location of its doors and walls. Compared to people in earlier times, we rarely have a chance to live outside this house. And the house is still changing; it is still being built as well as being demolished. In these lectures, I would like to take you through the house, starting with the foundation and then examining with you the walls that have been put up or taken down, the storeys and turrets that have been added, the flow of people through the house— who can come in, who can go into particular spaces.
In the past, I have often spoken about the social impact of technology in terms of apprehension and foreboding, but this is not my purpose here. My interest is in contributing to clarity. I want to know as much as possible about the house that technology has built, about its secret passages and about its trapdoors. And I would also like to look at technology in the way C.B. Macpherson looked at democracy — in terms of the real world. Technology, like democracy, includes ideas and practices; it includes myths and various models of reality. And like democracy, technology changes the social and individual relationships between us. It has forced us to examine and redefine our notions of power and of accountability.
It's making me think. A lot.
