The Languages of Edison's Light

Erscheinungsjahr 2002
ISBN: 978-0-262-52326-4
Verlag: Penguin Random House LLC

Buch, Englisch, 434 Seiten, Trade Paperback, Format (B × H): 154 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 590 g

Reihe: Inside Technology

Technology is business, and dealing with the media, the public, financiers, and government agencies can be as important to an invention's success as effective product development. To understand how rhetoric works in technology, one cannot do better than to start with the American inventor Thomas Alva Edison and the incandescent light bulb. Charles Bazerman tells the story of the emergence of electric light as one of symbols and communication. He examines how Edison and his colleagues represented light and power to themselves and to others as the technology was transformed from an idea to a daily fact of life. He looks at the rhetoric used to create meaning and value for the emergent technology in the laboratory, in patent offices and courts, in financial markets, and in boardrooms, city halls, newspapers, and the consumer marketplace. Along the way he describes the social and communicative arrangements that shaped and transformed the world in which Edison acted. He portrays Edison, both the individual and the corporation, as a self-conscious social actor whose rhetorical groundwork was crucial to the technology's material realization and success.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Bazerman, Charles

Bijker, Wiebe E

Carlson, W Bernard

Pinch, Trevor

Fachgebiete

• Technische Wissenschaften Technik Allgemein Technikgeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Semantik & Pragmatik

Über Autor(innen)

Pinch, Trevor
Trevor Pinch is Goldwin Smith Professor of Science and Technology Studies at Cornell University and coeditor of The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology (anniversary edition, MIT Press).

Bazerman, Charles
Charles Bazerman is Chair and Professor in the Department of Education at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Bijker, Wiebe E
Wiebe E. Bijker is Professor at Maastricht University and the author of Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs: Toward a Theory of Sociotechnical Change (MIT Press) and other books.

Sumit Ganguly is Professor of Government at the University of Texas at Austin.