Kellams: I’m Kyle Kellams. Advances in technology can make life better and simultaneously more annoying. Remember when if you were camping, your co-workers, boss, or random salespeople couldn’t reach you? Innovation can happen rapidly, and it doesn’t always allow us time to properly assess the consequences. Those consequences are the subject of study for Heidi Voskuhl, associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Voskuhl will give this semester’s Honors College Mic address at the University of Arkansas early next month and says we don’t always take time to consider the consequences of technology.
Voskuhl: That’s where we jump in, where many historians jump in and many folks in other fields as well. We just had an undergraduate curriculum discussion these days, and I say, you know what? Whatever field it is, we don’t have to privilege anyone. But I am biased. You know, I say as historians, we can try to do that, and we can talk about, first of all, of our own agency. That’s what we like to do. So if we believe something is happening to us, we can ask if we have any agency. Sometimes we don’t. That is certainly true. We can also ask about what technologies are, what kind of things we want to subsume under this term. And then we can ask about whether we want to grumble, whether we participate in some — like in women’s movement contexts, one would say whether we are complicit. That’s a term that I learned early on, both in English and in German, in fact. So, yeah, we try as historians, we try to take the lead here and there and come up with ideas, with thoughts, or with questions that we can ask ourselves.
Kellams: When you are on the University of Arkansas campus for your address, what will you be talking about?
Voskuhl: I will — that’s what I’m anticipating — I’ll be talking about that there was a time when engineers came into being as a profession, and that was a global phenomenon. It was definitely pretty marked and visible in the United States and in other countries as well, in the late nineteenth century, say, in the 1870s. That period sort of went into the 1910s. Associations were founded — they’re called the Big Four — mechanical engineering, mining, civil engineering, and electrical engineering. And before that, there certainly existed engineers. But when we talk about the specific process of professionalization, the same is true, say, for physicians — imagine for journalists, social workers, theologians like pastors. So you have to do something. So they are. Next thing we know, engineers are a group, and they speak individually like we do, but sometimes also we speak as a group. We represent ourselves, and we have certain committees that do work, and we communicate stuff, and we do some lobbying. It can be a number of things that we do.
And I will talk about how engineers talk about themselves when they become a professional group, because they had certain ambitions. They had certain ambitions — maybe still do — in terms of social class and status vis-à-vis other professions and other social groups and educated elites. And depending on what country you are in, there are other existing elites that maybe you want to catch up on. And engineers said that. They said, “This is the kind of influence and visibility and status we want to have in this country.” It could be physicians or lawyers. In other countries, it could be the aristocracy or senior members of the military. And then I look at what engineers did in order to enhance their social status and be more visible in society. And they do have a sense of who they want to be. They aspire to a certain kind of status, and they also mimic the behavior of these people. And can I say one more?
Kellams: Please, please, please, yes.
Voskuhl: And I’ll also talk about the period that that happened in. We call that the Second Industrial Revolution. That’s a bit of a nickname, because revolution is something that historians can’t agree on — whether some change is actually revolutionary or whether it’s totally gradual, the change. And usually we get it wrong because of the narrative that I said a moment ago — the drama — that is an appealing narrative. But sometimes the change is totally gradual, and we don’t even see it. And sometimes we overlook that kind of thing. Perhaps I can quickly say that the longest discussion that I know is about the French Revolution, whether or not it was even a revolution. And people said, no, it was tons of continuity. It wasn’t actually overthrowing. And that is within the context of France. And I would say even within the context of the American Revolution, that’s obviously a difficult thing to say.
But in the Industrial Revolution — same thing. Oh my goodness, was that not revolutionary? It was totally continuous. And the Second Revolution is very different from the first one. That’s the English one with the steam engine and the coal. And the second one is about steel and concrete, electricity, the internal combustion engine, and chemical engineering — like dyes and pharmaceutical industry. So, very roughly, that’s the rule of thumb. And engineers becoming a profession coincides with the Second Industrial Revolution. And then I’ll talk a little bit about the state of Arkansas and this part of our country — what kind of industrialization we’ve seen here and how engineers in Arkansas have constituted themselves as a social group.
Kellams: When you mention that engineers are beginning to form these organizations and they’re thinking about visibility and status, are they thinking about that in a way where they can have an effect on society, where they can have guidelines for what perhaps an emerging field might or might not be able to do?
Voskuhl: They have a number of different ideas, and it depends also on what kind of engineering you do. So yes, guidelines, safety. You know, if you always deal with big steam engines of some kind and they explode all the time — you know, it has to be safe. If you do automobiles, if you do some civil engineering and planning, which we do differently in the U.S. compared to, say, places like Singapore or the Vatican — very different countries — but there are other things that may not be immediately visible. One thing is the question of what maybe what we now call the consequences of technology in society. That’s, I think, what you started our conversation with — something that kind of happens, and we do feel the consequences, even in our kitchens, the way we communicate, the way we vote, the way we travel. And engineers becoming part of these conversations of consequence in technology in society — that started happening, at least in ways that we can read it literally as historians and hear it, just before World War I.
And once you had these big world wars and the Holocaust in place, there was increasingly more conversation about this, say, in the 20th century. And one thing was, we are experts. We have something to say. Maybe you can compare that to physicians, medical doctors, and public health. Hey, we have something to say, particularly when it involves many people, such as public health. So they said, we have expertise.
There was a movement in the U.S., particularly strongly, that was called technocracy. That was in the early ’30s, when around the globe there were movements against democracies. People said, you know what? Democracy as a model is maybe a little outdated. We have a new society now, an industrial society, and we need a new political model. The people who should run society possibly should be scientists, doctors, and engineers. That was called technocracy. And they had a club in New York City, of course, that was called Technocracy Inc.
I’m not entirely sure how much I’ll talk about that, but some of these ideas were ambitious, and they were radical. I’m not saying that happens to me in teaching, that there’s anything about technical experts that makes them less democratic than any of the rest of us. That is certainly true. Other people said, you should have businessmen run society and not elected officials. So people came up with formal models where they used the formal model of democracy. Look at what we do: we elect officials into these bodies, they vote, they come up with laws, and that’s how democracies usually run. I think that’s a widely accepted definition or some criteria of how democracy works. And some people said, you know what? No, now we have expertise. Now we have a modern industrial society. And democracy is something that precedes industrialization, which is true in this country, certainly not in other countries, such as in Europe.
So visibility of engineers — sometimes it just comes down to being a respected member of society.
Kellams: Heidi Voskuhl is an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania and will speak on the University of Arkansas campus Tuesday, Nov. 4, at 5:15 p.m. in Gearhart Hall as a guest of the U of A Honors College. We spoke by Zoom earlier this month.
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