A sharply organised study of the thinkers who tried to understand technology before “technology” became synonymous with consumer electronics.

Kuhns brings together Lewis Mumford, Siegfried Giedion, Jacques Ellul, Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan, Norbert Wiener and R. Buckminster Fuller, looking at them as competing interpreters of the same historical shift.

It looks at how the machine age affected media theory, prompting cybernetics and the flourishing. of the “post-industrial” condition. Mumford and Giedion supply the historical architecture; Ellul turns technique into a near-autonomous organising force; Innis and McLuhan shift attention toward media as environments; Wiener introduces cybernetics and feedback; Fuller imagines design and technological systems as tools for planetary reorganisation. 

Published in 1971, it is also a useful snapshot of a moment when the future still looked simultaneously mechanised, networked, utopian and vaguely apocalyptic. The vocabulary has aged. The problem has not.

Harper & Row / Colophon Books, New York, 1973. First Harper Colophon edition; originally published in hardcover by Weybright and Talley in 1971. Paperback. Moderate shelf wear, rubbing and creasing to covers and edges, with some age-toning and old retail price stickers to front cover. Internally clean; binding sound. Good condition.