Here is one more excerpt from a Marisa Olson interview. This is one from July, 2008 with a Philadelphia blogger named Annette Monnier.
Olson is an interesting thinker as she brings acute knowledge from many fields including the cultural history of technology and art history, in order to show that, as fields, their boundaries are growing blurrier and blurrier everyday.
My favorite passage is when she brings in Thomas Kuhn’s concept of paradigm in relation to technological paradigm shifts:
Marisa: Speaking of degrees, I don’t really have a degree in computer science but in the course of working on my PHD one of my official field titles was “The Cultural History of Technology” so I have spent a lot of time studying the history of batteries, televisions, telephones, and video games…
Annette: Is that like studying “the history and philosophy of science” or something?
Marisa: Yeah. Exactly, it’s very closely related.
Annette: I always liked those kind of courses. That sounds pretty cool.
Marisa: Yeah, me too. Thomas Kuhn is one of my favorite writers,“The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”.
Annette: Oh, yeah. I remember reading that in a class called something like “history and science of philosophy 101” or something.
Marisa: I re-read it every single year. Twenty-four is my favorite page.
Annette: I have no idea what that refers to but i’ll look it up.
Marisa: It’s just this line about how science is trying to force nature into a conformed thought. It’s all about how science as a field is trying to confirm existing ways of thinking, existing paradigms, and you have to wait until enough things don’t fit into the box until you change the box. I dunno. I like stuff like that.
Tags: marisa olson, paradigm, thomas kuhn