Future trends
Historians are naturally disinclined to discuss the future, and all the more so in their own field. Yet some portents regarding the history of technology are already visible. One trend, the social construction of technology, has come to historians from the sociology of science and the study of large-scale technological systems pioneered by Thomas Hughes and others.
Social constructivism argues that technologies do not come full-blown from the brains of great inventors, but result from the collaboration and conflicts among innovators, entrepreneurs, marketers, manufacturers, consumers, the media, governments, and other social groups. In effect, social constructivism represents a reaction to the technological determinism of the Whig- gish school of technological history that dominated the field for so long. In its extreme form, its practitioners argue that technologies are entirely dictated by social conventions and powerful interests, without regard to the laws of physics. A more nuanced approach to this perspective can be found in The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology (1987), edited by Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor Pinch.[258]And finally, we might cite a book that argues that the emphasis on innovation in technological history is misplaced, for most of the technologies in use today date back centuries; this is David Edgerton's The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900 (2007).[259] Will a new appreciation for old technologies become the norm in the field of the history of technology? As Zhou Enlai famously said of the impact of the French Revolution: “It is too soon to tell.”