A new book by David Edgerton, The Shock of the Old, asks us to look at the history of technology in a very different way, by questioning our fascination with innovation and looking instead at the stuff people use in the real world. Artillery and rifles loom large. It's an unsettling story that somehow turns into a global history of violence.

I fell on this book with delight once I'd grasped its basic premise - that the history of technology is usually a discussion about innovation and inventors, rather than how stuff gets used by real people. Edgerton isn't fooled by tech's snake-oil salesmen. He wants to shake up our usual assumptions about "old" tech and "new" tech. He highlights interesting anachronisms such as the huge importance of horses to Hitler in the invasion of France, or the massive increase in executions in America in the year 2000, or the appearance of rickshaws in modern London.

He's a debunker who wants to show us that our shiny new toys aren't that new, aren't as important as we've been told, and that their history is about boosterism and exaggeration. Instead he wants to give us the hard word - the shadow, if you will, behind the myth of technological progress.

He rightly points out that we have ill-founded views about which technologies are important and when they started to matter, and that technology history is often based on the hype of their inventors. He shows that we have an exaggerated respect for gee-whizz stuff like nuclear power and computers, and he has interesting things to say about the way nationalism distorts our ideas of where technology came from - and when it actually arrived.

He brings up some interesting ideas: that most scientists don’t actually create stuff, that most engineers don't actually innovate, and that there is an untoldand fascinating history of how technologies are maintained. He also shows how amazingly important some basic, unglamorous technologies such as refrigeration, have been in the evolution of world history.

Edgerton gallops through 200 years of history scoring points here and there, but many of his arguments are based on destroying various straw men used to represent 'the traditional view of technology', and some of this is a bit unconvincing.

For example, he goes to great lengths to prove that military organisations are not backward looking but are often at the forefront of developing new technologies. What a shocker. This idea doesn't seem a huge surprise to anyone who's watched the way that say, military simulation and virtual reality technology has bounced back and forth between Hollywood and the US miltary.

The book founders a bit when trying to build a unified theory about why histories of technology are so self-serving to their inventors and often fail to reflect the reality of people's lives. There is clearly part of us that loves the idea of being rescued by new technology, a weakness that sees us endlessly seduced by technology visionaries.

Edgerton is very good in pointing out the processes by which the New New thing is sold as the universal panacea: air travel, or area bombing, or nuclear power, or the Internet will end war, bring us all together, and prevent poverty - until the next tech wonder appears to offer a new dream of salvation.

He reserves particular bile for the pharmaceutical companies spending millions to bio-engineer useless variants of existing drugs, the military's obsession with bombing when wars are still won with boots and rifles, and the horrifying efficiency with which we have built enormous factories to kill millions of animals for our food.

Edgerton sees a clear link between technology and violence. The chapter on killing is something of a give away here. It is disquieting to read a narrative in which man's ability to kill insects with DTT in a bid to wipe out malaria culminates in the use of Zyklon B in the Holocaust.

He points out a tragic, direct connection between killing and manufacturing in the work of Henry Ford, which actually made me put the book down with a carnivore's disquiet. Ford got the original idea of the assembly line from the mechanised slaughterhouses of the Chicago meat packing industry, in an unpleasant conflation of factory work and suffering.

Where Edgerton does touch a nerve, and where his indignation really finds full expression, is in nailing technology's cheerleaders for their repetitious and unbelievable cant. We're now so saturated with positive messages around technology that I rather enjoyed this. We seem to have an amazing weakness for high-tech snake oil salesman.

Anyone who has sat through a technology press conference knows the basic narrative. "The current situation is dreadful!" We have an amazing product/service/feature that will fix these problems and with which you can't live without!" Dear reader, we know the product probably isn't very different from the other products.

If it was, they wouldn't need to sell it in so hard. Penicillin, as Edgerton points out, didn't really need much of a marketing push. Truth is these days most people probably don't need your product, it probably doesn't work as advertised, and it's may well make the world a more dangerous, ugly place.

Go home, read David Edgerton's book and give it some thought before you inflict it on the world.

Michael Parsons is the editor of CNET.co.uk, the personal technology and consumer electronics website. He was editorial director of the Industry Standard Europe and European correspondent for The Red Herring magazine, and spent five years working in Silicon Valley and worrying about technology. He can be reached at michael.parsons@cnet.co.uk

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