There's a nice article about the genesis and meaning of Moore's Law in IEEE Annals of the History of Computing — Ethan Mollick, either 2005 or 2006 -- that gets at some of this and might lead to useful sources.

Donald Mackenzie has a piece about Moore's Law as a self-fulfilling prophecy in his collection Knowing Machines.

- Paul

Le Oct 5, 2012 à 12:43 PM, Joshua Welsh a écrit :

Hello!

I wonder if anyone in the group could point me to a resource or two on the "Laws" and Maxims that seem to pervade the technology industry. I'm thinking of things such as Moore's Law, Brooks' Law, etc. I guess I'm especially looking for some kind of "meta scholarship" on laws and maxims themselves. It's simple enough to find sources that explain or contextualize the laws themselves. but a bit harder to find scholarship on the big picture.

A bit of context: I'm working on my dissertation, which involves the rhetoric that technological choices are built upon, and I've stumbled across an allusion to Amara's Law (i.e., People tend to overestimate technology in the short term and underestimate it in the long term.). I got to wondering just how big of a role such laws play in technology decisions. 

Thanks in advance!

-Josh

--

Joshua Welsh
PhD Candidate, Rhetoric and Scientific and Technical Communication
University of Minnesota

Department of Writing Studies

214 Nolte Center

315 Pillsbury Dr SE

Minneapolis, MN 55455

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Paul N. Edwards

Professeur invité, Sciences Po, Paris, 2012-13)

Professor of Information and History, University of Michigan 

A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (MIT Press, 2010)

Terse replies are deliberate (and better than nothing)

 

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