Edward Tenner

Edward Tenner is a Distinguished Scholar of the Smithsonian's Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation and a visiting scholar in the Rutgers University History Department. He also has held visiting research positions in the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Institute for Advanced Study, and the University of Pennsylvania, and in the Princeton departments and programs of Geosciences, English, Information Technology Policy, and has taught seminars in the...See more

Edward Tenner is a Distinguished Scholar of the Smithsonian's Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation and a visiting scholar in the Rutgers University History Department. He also has held visiting research positions in the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Institute for Advanced Study, and the University of Pennsylvania, and in the Princeton departments and programs of Geosciences, English, Information Technology Policy, and has taught seminars in the Princeton Humanities Council and the Freshman Seminars Program. He published his first book, Tech Speak or How to Talk High Tech: An Advanced Post-Vernacular Discourse Modulation Protocol in 1986 while still a book acquisition editor at Princeton University Press. He left the Press to accept a Guggenheim award in 1991. The resulting book, Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences , became an international bestseller and was followed by Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity (2003) and The Efficiency Paradox: What Big Data Can't Do (2018). He has been an international speaker at academic, government, and corporate meetings. See less