Panelists
David Lucsko (University of Detroit-Mercy)
Rachel Maines (Cornell University)
Kieran Downes  (MIT)

Commentator Joseph Corn
Chair Merritt Roe Smith (MIT)

Throughout American history, artists, politicians, authors, inventors, philosophers, and the wider American public have expressed passionate belief in the promise of technology. This passion has been expressed in a variety of ways. Some saw technological artifacts and systems as the embodiment of republican ideals; others deemed technology the guarantor of proper morals, or a manifestation of past and present greatness.

These beliefs have long proved fertile territory for historians, leading to a number of unique and valuable conceptions of the responses and motivations associated with technological change. For some, this emotional link is best described as “enthusiasm”; for others, it is “the sublime,” or “hedonism,” “fetishism,” the “gee-whiz factor,” or the pursuit of the “technically sweet.” Though related, each of these conceptions represents a different and somewhat disparate perspective on technological change. As a result, a unified discourse to describe and explain emotional responses to technologies has yet to emerge.

This was perhaps less of a problem when our field focused more or less exclusively on invention and mass-scale production. But as historians of technology have honed in on the role of technology’s users and user communities, the need for a reconceptualization of “technological enthusiasm” has emerged. This is because small communities of dedicated users often exhibit relationships with technological artifacts and systems that our extant terminology does not accurately describe. For example, many users’ emotional connections with the objects of their enthusiasm suggest that, unlike traditional understandings of enthusiasm, end results and social concerns often matter less than the inherent joys of tinkering, using, and interacting with technological artifacts. While these emotional connections have long been present as an undercurrent in the literature, we believe the time is right to bring them to the surface.

On the premise that terminological confusion begets conceptual misunderstanding, we have assembled a panel of scholars whose work touches in one way or another upon this lingering undercurrent. Our aim is to work toward conceptual clarity through an active exploration of terminological, theoretical, and conceptual boundaries. To that end, David Lucsko will focus on the unwritten “code of conduct” among postwar hot rodders that simultaneously influenced technical details, and emphasized the importance of the emotional response those details should invoke in the driver—a response Lucsko argues is key to understanding this user community. Rachel Maines will argue that under conditions of economic prosperity, technologies traditionally associated with productivity and labor can be repurposed to serve the emotional desires of users in the form of leisure and pleasure-seeking. This “hedonizing” process, she will show, is remarkably similar across both technological and temporal boundaries. Kieran Downes will show how high-end audio enthusiasts’ emotional attachments to the aesthetic qualities of vacuum tube-driven audio equipment have kept tube technology both alive and on the “cutting edge,” despite the inefficiencies, expense and other impracticalities of tubes compared to solid-state transistors. Together, these papers seek to revisit and expand notions of technological enthusiasm from the user’s point of view.