Accepting the Baton

• Published in: Technology and culture 2011, Vol.52 (1), p.1-5
• Main Author: Moon, Suzanne
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Academic discourse; Academic publications; Attention; Editors; Essays; Historians; History; Innovations; Journals (Academic); Multimedia; Pragmatics; Scholarly communication; Scholarly publishing; Scholars; Society; Time; Web portals
• ISSN: 0040-165X; 1097-3729; 1097-3729
• DOI: 10.1353/tech.2011.0032

Growth, however desirable, nevertheless comes with important challenges.Widely separated communities of scholars may not be able to come into regular interaction with each other at annual meetings or other events, given the pragmatic difficulties of time and money involved in long-distance travel.Under these circumstances the traditional role of the scholarly journal, to be a forum in which scholars separated by time and place can communicate and exchange knowledge and thereby remain a community, is increasingly vital to the life of the society. Francesca Bray, for example, has asked us to pay more attention to the cultural contexts and meanings of continuity and change in technology, going beyond a critique of progress to a wider understanding of the contours of technological cultures in the world.1 David Edgerton calls on us to question how we decide what technologies count as worthy of our attention as historians and how particular definitions of innovation have narrowed our vision.2 Over the past year (and continuing into January and April 2011), T&C has published a series of critical and thought-provoking essays about the practice of technology history. Started and nurtured by Joe Schultz, long-time managing editor of T&C and now senior associate editor, eTC was the start of T&C's efforts to reach out to new audiences using new media. Like any new endeavor, there will likely be bumps in the road, but we remain committed to finding ways to use media that usefully address our basic mission: to enhance scholarly publication, and therefore communication in the history of technology, and to facilitate the growth of scholarship that improves wider understanding of technology in human history.