With the advent of modernity, the sharing of resources and infrastructures rapidly expanded beyond local communities into regional, national, and even transnational space -- nowhere as visibly as in ...Europe, with its small-scale political divisions. This volume views these shared resource spaces as the seedbeds of a new generation of technology-rich bureaucratic and transnational commons. Drawing on the theory of cosmopolitanism, which seeks to model the dynamics of an increasingly interdependent world, and on the tradition of commons scholarship inspired by the late Elinor Ostrom, the book develops a new theory of "cosmopolitan commons" that provides a framework for merging the study of technology with such issues as risk, moral order, and sustainability at levels beyond the nation-state. After laying out the theoretical framework, the book presents case studies that explore the empirical nuances: airspace as transport commons, radio broadcasting, hydropower, weather forecasting and genetic diversity as information commons, transboundary air pollution, and two "capstone" studies of interlinked, temporally layered commons: one on overlapping commons within the North Sea for freight, fishing, and fossil fuels; and one on commons for transport, salmon fishing, and clean water in the Rhine. Contributors: Håkon With Andersen, Nil Disco, Paul N. Edwards, Arne Kaijser, Eda Kranakis, Kristiina Korjonen-Kuusipuro, Tiago Saraiva, Nina Wormbs The hardcover edition does not include a dust jacket.
Writing Technology into History Kranakis, Eda
Technology and Culture,
2021, 2021-00-00, 20210101, Letnik:
62, Številka:
1
Journal Article, Book Review
Recenzirano
Making Europe: Technology and Transformations, 1850–2000, a book series edited by Johan Schot and Phil Scranton, crowns a research effort of two decades.
Patent system system integration has altered the balance between the interests of patent holders and society. Two turning points in this process are examined: the 1883 Paris Convention, and the1978 ...launch of the Patent Cooperation Treaty and the European Patent Convention. The article shows how these treaties evolved and how further integration occurred after their implementation, following unforeseen/unintended paths stemming partly from technological change. Overall, global patent system integration has increased the territorial reach of patents, curtailed national restrictions on their use, enhanced rights of patent applicants/holders, and broadened patentability definitions. Corporations, the dominant patent holders, are the principal beneficiaries of these changes. Patents have become powerful, sometimes hegemonic tools for corporations to control technology, people, and markets on a global scale. A case study shows how Monsanto used its European patents on GM soybeans to make Argentina change its patent laws, to the perceived detriment of Argentine farmers.
Adrian Johns’s study of intellectual property (IP) battles combines a cyclical view of history with a Kuhnian model of transformative paradigm shifts. He explores copyright and patents, focusing on ...publishing, telecommunications (radio, telephone, internet), and analog and digital media. Johns examines sites of struggle, contention, and negotiation—conceptual and geographical—that have defined the meaning and limits of IP since the early modern era. He relates changing IP trends to major cultural shifts and questions of political authority and state power. He shows that IP concepts and struggles have been rooted principally in commerce and capitalism, and that what constitutes “piracy” is ever contested and contestable. This review suggests the need for further research into the consequences of long-term accretion of IP rights. This accretion, combined with the growing complexity of knowledge and artifacts (computers and cell phones embody hundreds of patents), poses new challenges to the viability of patent systems.
Kranakis reflects on the life and work of Edwin Thomas Layton Jr., a humanist and brilliant scholar. Born and raised in Los Angeles, Edwin Thomas Layton Jr. rose above a childhood that left him with ...a sense of abandonment. His father and namesake was an Annapolis-trained naval officer who became the head of intelligence for the U.S. Pacific Fleet, reaching the rank of rear admiral, and who gained fame posthumously from his book "And I Was There (1985)," which recounted events leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor. Ed Layton was not only a great humanist and brilliant scholar and teacher; he was also a leader of the Society for the History of Technology's institutional and intellectual development, serving on all the major prize committees, on the executive council, and finally as vice president and president between 1983 and 1986. For more than two decades he was an advisory editor for Technology and Culture or a key member of the SHOT editorial committee. Revolt of the Engineers: Social Responsibility and the American Engineering Profession, cited as "a model of research and synthesis in the social history of technology," and nineteen years later he was awarded the Leonardo da Vinci Medal.
The “Good Miracle” Eda Kranakis
Cosmopolitan Commons,
06/2013
Book Chapter
Today there are humans in airspace every hour of every day. Two billion of us spend time there every year, along with millions of tons of mail and freight.¹ We have become so accustomed to our use of ...this resource-space that we tend to overlook its challenges. We take it for granted that we can fly wherever and whenever, our checked baggage meeting us at the end of the trip, or that we can routinely and safely send and receive items by air to and from just about anywhere. In the early decades of human colonization of airspace, none of
The collapse of the Quebec Bridge in 1907 remains "one of the world's major structural failures," writes Eda Kranakis in "Fixing the Blame: Organizational Culture and the Quebec Bridge Collapse," one ...still studied by engineering students as an object lesson. But the common understanding of what caused the partially completed bridge to collapse is flawed, Kranakis argues. The Royal Commission that investigated blamed errors in judgment by two engineers, Theodore Cooper and Peter Szlapka, shaping a view of events that has prevailed ever since. But its conclusions are belied by a mountain of evidence collected by the commission itself during the inquiry and contributed by engineers and public officials subsequently. "The combined weight of this evidence suggests, rather, that the errors behind the collapse were rooted in the project's organizational culture." Kranakis links organizational factors to three crucial technical errors that the commission found to be responsible for the bridge's collapse, and uses that discussion to lead into the broader question of how organizations influence engineering. "One of the ironies of the Quebec Bridge disaster," she concludes, "is that the important organizational lessons it offeredÑalthough understood by many engineers and public officials at the time of the eventÑhave since been forgotten because later analysts accepted the Royal Commission's narrow interpretation of error and causation."
Thomas J. Misa's Leonardo to the Internet: Technology and Culture from the Renaissance to the Present represents a new kind of survey history of technology. Traditional surveys take technology as ...their starting point (rather than politics and culture) and hence follow a periodization distinct from traditional political history. They also tend to sacrifice depth to achieve encyclopedic coverage. Misa's survey takes politics and culture as its starting point, which places technology back into mainstream history. Seeking to define and analyze paradigmatic techno-cultural eras, Misa examines eight key episodes in Western history and technology from the Renaissance to the present and identifies an underlying pattern of technological/economic through and action for each era, illustrated by key examples. Misa's work echoes the approaches of Lewis Mumford and Bertrand Gille in defining key technological eras, but he broadens this approach to link it more firmly with mainstream history. Misa also draws upon the traditions of political economy and economic history, but he moves beyond the myth of "economic man" by paying careful attention to the influence of political and cultural regimes on technological development. Misa's postmodern, episodic reading of the past encourages student debate and questioning, and invites development of a richer variety of survey histories.
PDF
