Systems Analysis Must Become Cultural Analysis

Delivered as White's presidential address to the American Historical Association in December 1973, the lecture argued that the growing field of technology assessment — then dominated by engineers, economists, and systems analysts — was structurally inadequate to the problems it faced. Technical questions (what can the technology do? how fast? at what cost?) could be answered with systems tools. But the consequential questions (what values does the technology embody? whose interests does it serve? what kind of civilization is it building?) required cultural analysis — the kind of reading historians and humanists were trained to perform. The lecture was a manifesto for the integration of technology history into the humanities and a warning that leaving technology assessment to the quantitative disciplines alone would produce catastrophically incomplete evaluations.