As he developed his technological interests in the setting of the Musée de l’Homme, Leroi-Gourhan was particularly attentive to the description and documentation of material objects. Cardboard fiches (index cards) with standardized entries – name, function, material, location of finding, etc. – served to ‘bring the milieu of the object’ back into the museum. During his fieldwork in Japan from 1937 to 1939, Leroi-Gourhan refined his documentary approaches, combining ethnographic photographs and object collections. Back in France, however, following the defeat and German occupation, this mass of accumulated fiches became less compelling, especially when Leroi-Gourhan discovered Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution (1907) with its élan vital and intuitionist philosophy. This notably inspired him to develop the distinction between technical ‘facts’, which are unstable and localized, and technical ‘tendencies’, which are stable, wide-ranging and deterministic. These two concepts, outlined in Evolution et techniques (1943, 1945), characterized his approach to technical phenomena and material civilizations.

This chapter explores the significant impact of the digital age on the realm of literature, focusing specifically on Hebrew poetry as a distinctive case study. This focus is driven by the declining status of literature within Israeli culture and the dynamic state of its reviving literary landscape. The study is structured in two phases: the first delves into practices and phenomena, while the second aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of the field’s logic and values by examining different participants and levels. The chapter claims that the necessity of the second phase arises from the current state of the field, where the adaptation of media has become so ingrained that it conceals its influence on literary themes, forms, and language. The chapter addresses this gap using the theoretical framework of mediatization, which explores long-term changes associated with media evolution.

Chapter 5 focuses on the labor process to analyze what industrial modernization meant for the workers and how coercive practices and welfare measures were employed to curb workers’ mobility. It depicts the industrial transformation and mechanization in the Imperial Arsenal under the supervision of American, and then British engineers. It examines the labor-management policies and practices that developed in response to the formation of a heterogeneous labor force, and examines the regulations and instructions on the production process issued by the naval bureaucracy in the early 1870s. In parallel with the increasing division of labor and the desire of the state elites to control the labor process, the Arsenal administration attempted to consolidate capitalist relations through top-down supervision of the labor process, time discipline, and the spatial-administrative reorganization of the labor force. In addition, intending to halt the problem of turnovers and increase workers’ loyalty to their workplace, the administration implemented policies aimed at bonding civilian workers to the arsenal, including the social security benefits as institutionalized in the mid-1870s.

Chapter 1 investigates how naval reforms in the late 18th century aimed at rationalizing production, marked by standardizing, centralizing, and concentrating the shipbuilding process in the context of provisioning crisis and market relations. It gives a brief overview of shipbuilding and its transformation in the late eighteenth century, both in the Ottoman Empire and in Europe. It highlights the increasing dependence of the navy on market relations and dynamics in the late eighteenth century, catalyzed by the provisioning crisis emanating from technological transformations, naval competition and military pressures, environmental restrictions, and political-economic challenges, as illustrated by the example of provisioning timber. Against this crisis, naval administrations introduced substantial changes in the production process under the supervision of French naval engineers, whose policies centered on professionalization and the use of “scientific” principles in shipbuilding. The chapter concludes with a discussion on the spatial concentration of capital in the Arsenal, by renewing and expanding its production capacity and exerting centralized control over the production process.

Is solidarity possible in societies characterized by the exchange of data, under conditions of digitalization and AI? If not, why not? To answer these questions, I inquire into the emergence of solidarity in two historical cases. The first maps German coal and steel workers’ resistance to exploitation during the industrial revolution in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. The second case explores resistance and community formation by the Maroon, a group of fugitive plantation slaves in eighteenth-century Suriname. I analyse these cases with the help of four heuristic elements: (1) communal living of labourers entailed by the industrialization of a new technology (steam powered industry and slavery-powered plantation agriculture), (2) under-regulation of ensuing labour relations, (3) the emergence of resistant proto-law amongst labourers and (4) the response of repressive-appeasing law by owners and the state. I extract two necessary attributes of solidarity: the sharing of a physical place by labourers forming a community in solidarity, and the location of that place on the inside of a politics of exploitation. I conclude that cybernetics, digitalization and AI undercut the preconditions for solidarity, as they eradicate the sharing of a physical place on the inside of exploitation politics.

From the late sixteenth century, foreign engineers promoted new hydraulic technologies in England. Yet, their techniques were not alone sufficient to implement wetland improvement at a grand scale. Drainage projects generated local controversy almost everywhere they were proposed. Disputes pivoted on thorny questions about who was empowered make decisions about the management of water and land, and by what means. Under the early Stuarts, the crown and its ministers began to act as instigators and facilitators driving forward fen projects. The use of increasingly coercive methods to suppress and circumvent local opposition became entangled in wider constitutional controversies about the limits of royal authority and definitions of the public good. Wetland communities were active participants in debates about the economy and morality, environments and justice, consent and legitimate authority. Customary politics proved a powerful force, unravelling a litany of proposed projects in the early seventeenth century. This impasse was broken when Charles I launched the first state-led drainage project in Hatfield Level in 1626, yoking coercive authority to transnational expertise.

The question ‘what use is mineral magnetism?’ is addressed in this chapter. Magnetic rock-forming minerals can record magnetic information on timescales that exceed the age of the Earth, which enables paleomagnetism to underpin the global plate tectonic paradigm and provide the geomagnetic polarity timescale that is used to calibrate geological time. Paleomagnetic analysis also enables understanding of terrestrial and extraterrestrial magnetic fields and planetary processes that generate these fields and their variations through time. Environmental magnetism exploits the sensitivity of magnetic minerals to environmental processes at Earth’s surface, which facilitates understanding of the climatic, tectonic, or other driving forces of environmental change. The magnetic properties of nanoparticles are also exploited by organisms, as studied in biomagnetism, and are manipulated by humans in industrial, technological, and medical applications, which makes mineral magnetism useful in an exceptional range of fields. This book serves workers in these fields by providing an introduction to mineral magnetism and in-depth treatments of the magnetic properties of terrestrial magnetic minerals.

An account of the making of the Wooster Group’s Rumstick Road, an autobiographical inquiry into the circumstances and legacy of the suicide of Spalding Gray’s mother. (The production, in rehearsal in the fall and winter of 1976, held an open rehearsal in December before opening the following spring.) The chapter considers the Wooster Group’s approach to acting (distinct from the style of its predecessor, the Performance Group), the visual art sources for the production’s imagery and structure, the use of recording technology, the role of the spectator, and the nature of privacy.

This chapter introduces the discussion of the ineluctable obsolescing of the technological apparatus of theatre. Opening with a discussion of the representation of technological and human obsolescence in Star Trek, this chapter repositions the work of media archaeology, which typically excludes theatre from its purview. And yet, in its attention to the operational dimension of lost, dead, or passing technological instruments, media archaeology locates a network of inquiry profitably directed toward theatre. In a reading of the work of Thomas Elsaesser, Wolfgang Ernst, Jussi Parikka, Rebecca Schneider, and others, this chapter introduces the ways apparatus, nostalgia, and obsolescence provide a lens for thinking contemporary theatre.

Children’s play reflects the culture and cultural tools of a community. Digital play and digital tools have evolved over time. Described by Susan Edwards as three generations: First generation: 1980 to early 2000s with the focus was on children’s use of digital technologies; Second generation: 2010 with the availability of the iPad and independent digital activity by children; Third generation: the integration of technologies with children’s socio-material activities and everyday lives.