Author Description

Technology has built the house in which we all live. Compared to people of earlier times, we rarely have a chance to leave the house that technology built, and is continuing to build. In these essays, Professor Franklin examines the foundations and layout of the house of technology, its secret passages and hidden trapdoors, and describes the ways in which prescriptive technologies, with their division of labour and associated political systems have, especially since the Industrial Revolution, turned our perception of reality upside-down. Technology, defined as the grounded practice of working and living together, has always been part of human existence. What is new is the scale of intervention by mechanical technologies in everyday life, resulting in a "culture of compliance" and the acceptance, as normal, of external control and management.