CONCEPT
Use-Centered History of Technology
Edgerton's signature methodological reorientation — the insistence that the history of technology be told from the standpoint of what people actually use, not what inventors invent.
Use-centered history is David Edgerton's foundational contribution to the philosophy of technology — a deliberate reorientation away from the inventor's workshop and toward the user's hand. Where conventional histories trace lineages of breakthroughs, Edgerton traces patterns of deployment: how many people used a given technology, for what purposes, under what conditions, and for how long. The reorientation produces a radically different picture of which technologies have mattered most. The bicycle outranks the supersonic jet. The corrugated iron sheet outranks the geodesic dome. The condom outranks the antibiotic. The shift is not sentimental but empirical: it counts what was actually used, not what was celebrated as new.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The framework emerged from Edgerton's frustration with what he calls the innovation-centric bias of academic and popular history — the assumption that the newest technology is the most important technology, and that the proper subject of study is the moment of invention. Across The Shock of the Old (2006) and