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From automobiles to automated messages, personal technologies have come to shape the daily lives of nearly all Canadians. The history of consumer technology can reveal much about the material needs, social ideologies, gendered assumptions, and economic considerations of the peoples who used, rejected, and manipulated technologies of consumption.
Why have Canadians favoured some technologies over others? Why (and when) do technologies fail? How have personal technologies influenced notions of work? Leisure? Masculinity? Femininity? Public space? Private space? What has been valued more — aesthetics or function? Scientia Canadensis, a peer-reviewed journal devoted to the history of science, technology, and medicine, invites proposals that consider these types of questions for a special themed issue on "consumer technology".
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