Technology and Social Complexity

[from back in the day when books had only one title and no subtitle]

Maurice N. Richter Jr., State University of New York Press, Albany, 1982

• The rain dances perform a latent function for the tribe, by keeping morale and cohesion, and thus persists, despite not actually making it rain. (p10)
• "The first machines were people." -Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization, 1963 (p11)
• Organizational technology vs the material, chemical technology and engineering technology of using deadly chemicals sprayed from planes to kill blackbirds all over America - China's war against the sparrow - One morning in 1957, the population of Beijing was organized in a "war against the sparrow", which commenced at 4:45am. The plan was to station people everywhere -- on roofs, in the branches of trees, in streets, in fields -- so the sparrows when flushed from their resting places all over the city would find no place to land and would eventually drop exhausted to the ground. -SeeHan Suyin, "The Sparrow Shall Fall," New Yorker 10 Oct 1959 (p13)
• "Much that Red men know, they forget. They have no way to preserve it. White men make what they know fast on paper like catching a wild animal and taming it." -cited by George F Foster. Se-quo-yah: The American Cadmus(?) and Modern Moses (Philadelphia: Office of the Indian Rights Association, 1885; republished by AMS, 1979), p92.
• Sequoyah eventually made his own alphabet and system of writing, and he called it "talking leaves".
• The Sequoyah Accident and Accidental Innovation - He thought he was imitating the White man when he constructed a system of writing for his people. However, he did not understand enough about the White man's alphabet to know that he was not merely imitating it but was actually improving upon it: his script apparently made it possible for Cherokee youth to learn to read simple messages in a very few days, something that White youth using their alphabet could not usually do. (p69) 
• On the evolution of technology - "A deliberately constructed writing system is maximally "technological" at the time of its construction. If it remains frozen while relevant circumstances (e.g., pronunciations) change, it will still presumably involve a technological aspect insofar as it is a "means" for achieving certain communicative "ends," but its technological status will be diminished by its growing entanglement in unquestioned tradition". (p17)

• On using technological criteria for classifying societies:
• eotechnic - water and wood
• paleotechnic - coal and iron
• neotechnic - electricity and alloy (p26)
• -Lewis Mumford. Technics and Civilization. 1963

• Benjamin Franklin's stove was intended to substitute American wood for imported coal (p47) -Gerald Holton, Daedalus 109, no. 1 (Winter 1980): 10.