While considering the role of media in shaping and examining histories, we must also grapple with formal limitations in approaching and understanding the past. The thesis aims to bring video games into critical conversations regarding history, memory, and nostalgia by considering the similar and unique perspectives the medium can bring alongside film, television, radio, and literature. Player positionality and interactivity within the unconventional, non-linear game storytelling form allows for different engagements with history. Focusing on the futuristic, post-apocalyptic role-playing game Fallout 3 (2008), this study interrogates the game’s nuanced presentation of genre as a cultural mediation of the past, the negotiation of memory with history, and our problematic assumptions about technology and narratives of progress. While the study finds games may provide rewarding and potentially critical explorations of history, the self-reflexive nature of video gaming emphasizes the medium’s possibilities, limitations, and implications as a cultural product shaped by the very forces constructing history. / text

Natural economic orders are made and unmade. Industries such as telecommunications, rail transportation, and electricity distribution are prime examples. In the last two decades we have witnessed the widespread unmaking of these long established public natural monopolies. This study focuses its attention on the state-owned monopoly in Swedish telecommunications which became complete in 1918 and prevailed until the beginning of the 1980s. Given the present widely-held understanding that this was a natural monopoly eventually unmade by technological change, this study asks how this natural monopoly once emerged. The study concentrates on the creation and the technological and economic stabilisation of a national state-owned monopoly in telephony in Sweden during the period 1903 - 1930. At the centre is the termination of competition in telephony in Stockholm in 1918. The study is devoted to a detailed investigation into the various controversies whose eventual settlement led to the creation of the monopoly and the introduction of automatic exchanges, a central theme in the stabilisation of the monopoly. Focusing on techno-economic controversies, this study presents a perceptive approach to the inquiry into order and change in industries, allowing for an inclusion of how notions of the natural order and the inevitable change are made and sustained within such fields of economic practice. / Diss. Stockholm : Handelshögsk., 1999

The present study analyzes attitudes made manifest when media technology is used in teaching at Swedish upper secondary schools. It examines discourses related to the subject of history by comparing contemporary circumstances with those of the mid-1980s, making research in both educational history and history education indispensible to its execution. The study considers the impact of technology on human interaction as an essentially social construction. Furthermore, it addresses questions about the role media technology plays in current discourses, about the actors that are manifested in these discourses and about their didactic implications. Since the investigation focuses on discourse, it is an interpretive work. Analytical tools have been borrowed from the field of discourse theory to facilitate a broad understanding of discourse and communication. The analysis is conducted in order to reconstruct chains of analogy and nodal points of communication in media technology and teaching, with specific attention paid to matters related to the subject of history. Secondary school policy documents, curricula relevant to each period, teacher´s periodicals and interviews with history teachers are combined to reconstruct discourses on technology in education. Interviews were conducted with six history teachers, three of whom taught in the 1980s, while the remainder began teaching in the past fifteen years. The periodicals studied are Lärarnas tiding and Skolvärlden, including every issue published in the years 1983, 1985, 1987, 2008, 2010 and 2012. Four discourses on media technology in education have been reconstructed from this material. Two of the discourses are relevant to the mid-eighties, and have been called the discourse on the school of the future and the discourse on film, junk culture and education, respectively. The discourses reconstructed from the years around 2010 are named the discourse on the contemporary school and the discourse on good teaching. These discourses generally nurture an optimistic belief in what media technology can mean to school and teaching. The reasons for using technology in the classroom are based on notions of what is required from society or what is relevant to the students. The roles of media technology in education are affected by several groups of actors, including government officials, marketers, school leadership and teachers. The process was however never significantly affected by formal policy. One aspect central to a positive view of media technology in education was that it would improve the quality of teaching, especially in the case of history, characterized by storytelling and lecturing. Certain didactic considerations became visible in the study of these discourses, which risked being shallow and trend sensitive, insofar as it might be difficult for teachers to find suitable forums for peer-to-peer subject specific reflections on media technology.

A la fin du XIXe siècle, le fluide électrique a été responsable des transformations profondes dans la vie quotidienne de la société asturienne, qu'incluaient, par exemple, des nouvelles formes d'organiser le temps social, de planifier le travail et les loisirs. L'électricité a consacré la rupture dans la séparation rigide entre la nuit et le jour qui existait avant de son apparition, et s'est révélée comme le meilleur moyen d'éclairage en surpassant aux huiles végétales ou minérales et au gaz d'éclairage. L'électricité alors est devenue une image symbolique du progrès et sa brillante lumière a commencé à conquérir l'espace public, l’espace de travail et même le domaine privé, comme une métaphore du triomphe de la société moderne industrielle et en induisant des modifications dans les habitudes et les coutumes. Ce qui est proposé avec cette étude c’est, par conséquent, un projet de recherche capable d'établir les commencements et le premier développement de l'industrie électrique dans les Asturies, comme contribution générale à l'étude du processus espagnol d'électrification. Cette étude essaie également de déployer une ample vision dans l'analyse, capable d'intégrer les multiples facettes et les implications du phénomène. Surtout, il y aura une attention spéciale aux approches socioculturelles du phénomène électrique, comme ceux qui se rattachent aux loisirs, à la divulgation de l'électricité, l'électricité et les espaces de représentation urbaines, l’imaginaire et les représentations de cette énergie ou à l'électricité et la vie quotidienne ou l'espace domestique. Bref, il s'agit de développer une vraie histoire sociale et culturelle de l'électricité, de ses représentations et ses pratiques à partir en utilisant les Asturies, cette région espagnole, comme laboratoire pour analyser l'interaction mutuelle entre techniques, société et culture. / At the end of the 19th century, the electricity has been responsible for deep modifications in the daily life of the Asturian society that included, for example, new forms of organizing the social time or planning the paces of work and leisure. Electricity establishes the break in the rigid separation between night and day which existed prior to its appearance, and proved itself as the best way of lighting in surpassing other technologies as mineral or vegetable oils and gas lighting. The electricity then became a symbolic image of progress and its brilliant light began to conquer the public space, the workspace and even the private sphere, as a metaphor for the triumph of modern industrial society and by inducing changes in habits and traditions. What comes with this study is, therefore, a research project capable of establishing the beginnings and the first development of the electric industry in Asturias, a peripheral region in Spain, as a general contribution to the study of the Spanish electrification process. This study also tries to deploy a broad vision in the analysis, capable of integrating the many implications of the phenomenon. Above all, there is special attention to the socio-cultural approaches to the electrical phenomenon, such as those which relate to the leisure and the sociability, to the cultural outreach of electricity, electricity and urban spaces of representation, the imaginary of this energy or the relations between electricity, and everyday life or the domestic sphere. In short, it is to develop a true social and cultural history of electricity, its representations and practices from using Asturias, this Spanish region, as a laboratory to analyze the mutual interaction between technology, society and culture.

Aus der Einleitung: 'Vitamine sind Produkte ernährungsphysiologischer Experimente, die seit den 1890er Jahren durchgeführt wurden und Aufklärung über gravierende Erkrankungen in niederländischen und britischen Kolonien liefern sollten. Ihren Namen erhielten sie 1912 durch den polnischen Biochemiker Casimir Funk.1 Die Identität der Vitamine war durch ihre Leistung bei der Heilung von Mangelkrankheiten bestimmt. Im angloamerikanischen Raum und später in der übrigen Welt etablierte sich rasch eine alphabetische Nomenklatur: Vitamin A verhütet die Augenkrankheit Xerophthalmia, Vitamin B verhütet Beriberi, Vitamin C verhütet Skorbut. Zu diesen Vitaminen kamen in den 1920er Jahren das antirachitische Vitamin D, das Antisterilitäts-Vitamin E und das blutungsstillende Vitamin K hinzu. Die schon in geringsten Mengen gegebene Leistungsfähigkeit dieser Wirkstoffe weckte große Erwartungen, die weit über die experimentell herausgearbeitete Kompetenz hinausgingen. Schon über die von der IG Farben als Betaxin oder Betabion vertriebenen Vitamin B1-Präparate ließ sich jedoch zunächst nicht mehr sagen, als dass sie Beriberi heilten, was für den Inlandsmarkt keine besonders lukrativ erscheinende Aussage war.2 Der Schweizer Historiker Beat Bächi zeigt eindringlich, dass auch der weltweit führende Schweizer Vitamin-C-Produzent Hoffmann-La Roche noch Ende der 1920er Jahre die therapeutischen und kommerziellen Aussichten der Askorbinsäure nicht bestimmen konnte. Die Verwendung als Skorbutheilmittel spielte natürlich keine große Rolle. Es schien aber möglich, dass sich der spezifische Einfluss, den das Vitamin auf die oxydoreduktiven Vorgänge des Organismus ausübe, auch in anderen therapeutischen Richtungen auswirken könne. Bächi verweist darauf, dass die Propagandabteilungen der pharmazeutischen Firmen eine markante Rolle bei der Etablierung von Anwendungsgebieten spielten. Aber mehr noch setzte sich für alle Vitamine die Indikationsstellung Hypovitaminosis durch, der relative Vitaminmangel, mit der Vitamingaben für einen letztlich unbegrenzten Bereich an Erscheinungen empfohlen werden konnte.3 Vitamintherapien richteten sich nicht an die an Avitaminosen leidenden Kranken, sondern an Gesunde, die aufgrund von Hypovitaminosen noch nicht gesund genug waren bzw. Mangelkrankheiten vorbeugen wollten. Vor allem das Vitamin C wurde in den 1930er Jahren als universal einsetzbares Mittel zur Stärkung und Optimierung des Organismus konzipiert.' [...]:Einleitung S. 59 Biologische Nachweisverfahren S. 61 Chemisch-physikalische Bestimmungsmethoden S. 65 Nahrungsfreiheit und Leistungsmedizin S. 68 Gehaltsforschungen und Erhaltungsmaßnahmen S. 72 Vitaminisierung und Lebensmitteltechnik S. 76 Minimum und Optimum S. 81 Fazit S. 84

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.