White Heat: People and Technology

"A Coca-Cola bottle, a Samurai sword, a Rolls-Royce, and a prehistoric stone tool are linked not only because they are projects of technology, but also because each is a symbol invested with meaning," writes historian Carroll Pursell. His adventurous and timely book takes the reader on a tour through history and around the lives, showing what machines can tell us about the world we want to have.

White Heat explores a range of themes: technology's effect on our perceptions of time and space; its role in mass production theories that turn workers into interchangeable parts; its sanitizing of warfare with "smart" weapons that kill more people more quickly; and the psychological and social implications of the "information age."

Pursell demonstrates these themes with absorbing anecdotes and provocative questions. How was the nineteenth-century boom in soap manufacturing related to standards of social morality? How does voice-mail encode certain cultural assumptions about gender and class? In revealing the ways that technological developments embody myth, ritual, and fantasies, Pursell shows that technology is as culturally specific, and as culturally illuminating, as art, literature, or any other work of the human imagination.

Accessible and lively, with tales of quirks and mishaps, White Heat is for anyone caught up in our beeping, roaring, technologized world.

White Heat was written to accompany a major eight-part television series, shown in the fall of 1994.