Appropriating Technology: Vernacular Science and Social Power

by Ron Eglash, Jennifer L. Croissant, Giovanna Di Chiro and Rayvon Fouché, Eds.
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2004
376 pp., illus. Paper, $25.95
ISBN: 0816634270.

Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher
Saginaw Valley State University, University Center MI 48710 USA

mosher@svsu.edu

Appropriating Technology: Vernacular Science and Social Power is divided into sections on Body Tech, Information Technologies, Environmental Technologies and Invention. In their different concerns and editorial styles, its four editors give each section a somewhat different feel. The book begins on an historical note, as Massimiano Bucchi examines the nineteenth century popular press coverage of Louis Pasteur's experiments with anthrax. Body Tech section editor Jennifer L. Croissant of the University of Arizona contributes on bodybuilders' pharmacopeia, both a lucrative industry and subject of recurring irate investigation by athletic commissions. In following essays, disease-preventing birth control barriers are negotiated in their sites of interpersonal use, whether condoms protecting a female prostitute, or in gay men's use of the female condom.

The broadly inclusive Information Technologies section is edited by Ron Eglash of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Eglash interviews Turtle Heart, artist and originator of the American Indian Computer Art Project, which produced historic Native American motifs with early paint systems and disseminated them into cyberspace for tribal and intertribal communication. Digital tools are further celebrated in the desktop computer and Internet that has enabled and disseminated alternative journalism and in digitized sound sequencing and layering for hip-hop mix strategies. The persistent digital divide, where economically privileged populations communicate online while others do not, has been met with critical responses from artists like Guillermo Gomez-Pena or the VNS Matrix collective. Anyone involved in computer education should read Samuel M. Hampton's "Cultural Paths to Computing: African American Women in a Community Technology Center".

The third section, Environments, is edited by Giovanna Di Chiro, who interviewed Environmental Health Action activist Linda Price King. Other writers assembled here give instances of decentralizing scientific expertise and research in grassroots environmental monitoring and epidemiology, despite being disregarded by the scientists on the corporate polluters' payrolls. Meanwhile GPS mapping, plus other appropriate technologies, has been used successfully by Native American environmental activists to protect their lands and families. This section's inspiring essays provide hard-won lessons in community organizing that build upon each other.

The most historical of the four sections may be Invention. Editor Rayvon Fouché, of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, calls the assimilationalist African American engineer Lewis Latimer "Not Made for Black History Month" for his identification as an engineer of Edison's circle rather than a "race man". The history of the phonograph 1895-1915 is presented in terms reminiscent of Jonathan Sterne's work on early sound reproduction in his book The Audible Past. The book's concluding essay, Paul Rosen's "Up the Vélorution: Appropriating the Bicycle and the Politics of Technology", is rich and surprising in coverage of global markets of English and Japanese bike manufacturers, gendered design in girl's bikes and mountain bikes, and the pro-bike politics of Critical Mass and bike messengers.

One might have expected further inclusion in this book of popular medicine, self-medicating, and recreational substances, though one essay discusses transgendered people taking hormones. The four editors position this project apart from previous research on technology appropriators, for past studies presented appropriated tech users as consumers, members of a misinformed public or eccentric outsiders. Eglash, Croissant, Di Chiro, and Fouché see empowerment when both science and engineering are in the people's own hands and favor the dissemination of all forms of technical knowledge to better daily life, or in creative artistic misuse.