CONCEPT
The Five Stages of Technology Transition
Daston's synthesis of the recurrent pattern observed across knowledge-technology transitions: threshold, exhilaration, resistance, adaptation, settled use — with institutional infrastructure always arriving later than the technology requires.
The history of objectivity, read as a sequence of transitions between knowledge-producing technologies, reveals a consistent pattern that recurs with variations across centuries. Daston's analysis, extending Edo Segal's five-stage framework in You On AI, identifies the structural regularity across documented transitions from hand-drawn illustration to photography, from qualitative description to statistical analysis, from analog measurement to computational modeling. The pattern is not speculative or predictive; it is the retrospective organization of documented sequences, each producing the same stages in the same order, with variations in tempo and severity but not in structure.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The first stage is threshold crossing — the moment at which a new technology crosses a capability boundary that makes the previous method categorically different rather than merely less efficient. The photograph did not make illustration slightly slower by comparison; it made the hand-drawn scientific image appear subjective in ways that had not been visible before. The threshold