Article Review
Student’s name
Institutional affiliation
Course
Date
After Innovation, Turn to Maintenance.
After innovation, turn to maintenance, talks more about maintenance as a vibrant subject on its own. Through this article, the author tries to prove that one does not need to get-together innovation nor innovation-speak so that the significance of maintainers and maintenance gets clearly shown. However, if maintenance practices and routines are carefully looked into, we get to realize that creativity and innovation are the main features. The author tries to give a clear explanation of how new technologies have a significant part in maintenance. Besides, maintenance can be innovative. Maintenance is a beneficial umbrella used for assembling what other historians of technology have already published, researched, and are yet to commence the technology.
The author begins by explaining maintenance in two different ways; maintenance as the process of development of technology where the early phases are invention and innovation and secondly historiography that encourages change in a particular field. Maintenance in Historiography, the author, explains how maintenance was not well appreciated in the past. It was viewed as a minor subtheme in the history of technology. Most people focused on developing new machines rather than maintaining and repairing old machines. In addition, authors who wrote more of machines being invented with technology in the past but never considered the aspect of maintenance. With the rise of the internet and other social media platforms, there has been a demand for explanations of the origins and developments of machines. Historians of technology are advised to take that opportunity to also explain more on the aspect of maintenance in technology development.
Maintenance is a process of development of technology; the author gives an overview of how invention and innovation are critical phases of the early stages when developing the machine. By understanding the early stages clearly, then the maintenance of a device would be much more comfortable. Besides, there could be many ways in which creativity could get implemented during maintenance. These could result in even developing a better machine rather than treating as waste and throwing it away. The identity of maintainers is the dominant theme brought out by the author. The work of maintenance is mainly performed by people who have no positions in society. Where a great deal of maintenance is for women and children, thus this norm presents women as maintenance work is for the women. Capitalism and how maintenance practices affect the larger-scale systems are other themes identified by the author.
Through the article, the author has tried to show the essence of maintenance throughout. He not only considers how people view maintenance nowadays but also considers the past historians of technology. The theme of maintenance has stimulated lots of conversations that have led to the publishing of this book. It makes the content in the article credible for reading because it has also considered some major themes which favor the presence and absence of maintenance. The author has gone ahead to prove his thesis statement of maintenance by getting into further details by giving examples of how the past communities embraced maintenance like the San people of southern Africa. He also gives out new examples of how other communities never appreciated the aspect of maintenance. Also, we see how he considers every century implemented the idea of maintenance, and even the authors who wrote books about invention.
Themes are also taken into consideration as an aid to help in explaining more on maintenance. The book is well written; however, some aids would have been useful to explain more on maintenance. Some statistical data, graphs, and also pictures would have made the book much more interesting to read. For instance, graphs would have aided in showing statistical figures of how maintenance gets appreciated over the past years. However, the book has elaborated on maintenance, and it forms a good foundation, especially for scholars and researchers, to know more about maintenance.