Having finished my BA History last academic year I have now started in a Research Masters program focussing on Modern History. As we do not have any specialists in the field of the History of Technology at my Uni I'm pretty much left to my own devices in further pursuing my interest (as obvious from my Flair that would be Aviation History) One of my assignments is an analysis of my field of interest, broadly speaking the History of Aviation falls under the History of Technology.
As there is no real guidance / clear cut starting point for me I'm concretely looking for seminal papers / authors with regards to theoretical approaches to the History of Technology. I hope that someone can point me towards them.
So far I think I have identified two main streams apart from merely deterministically describing the development of technology , one focussing on the influence of society on technological development, and the other doing it vice versa. Really I'm a bit lost and overwhelmed at the moment.
So it's tough to know where to start in a field. One approach for what counts as "canonical reading" is to look at what graduate students previously have had to read for their "general exams" in American academia (sometimes called "oral exams"). You can sometimes find those online. So here's one that a friend of mine (who I haven't seen in many years... I wonder what he's up to) did for his PhD in STS/HoT at MIT in 2006 that I found by Googling, which is all about "big issues" in the history of technology, for example. His research thesis, if I recall correctly, was on the development of hifi audio systems and the role of audiophiles, so you can see that influence in his choice of topics (technology & consumption, technological enthusiasm, even technology & the military, since there is a military connection to the development of the amplifiers if I recall correctly).
You can see that he's divided it up into different sections of particular interest to him; you can also see its totally overwhelming. If I were advising you, I'd say, pick a few of the interesting-sounding books from the "general and theoretical" section and use their introductions as a guide. Most of the names in that section of the list are "big ones" and useful for defining important strains in the history of technology. Hughes in particular is a good place to start.
This approach is by no means comprehensive, or even up to date, but it's a place to start. You can also assume pretty much everything is on there for a reason. Of special note are the edited volumes (anything with "eds." after the names) because those will contain many essays, and the introductions of those will summarize a lot of positions.
The introductions of these kinds of books ought to tell you what they are about, where they fit in the existing literature (the "literature review"), and what their contributions are. That's all you need for the kind of write-up you're doing now; later you can focus down on the ones you're most interested in.
Not being an academic myself, I know the danger of falling into the cat-chasing-laser-pointer problem of technology writing ( "ooohh, look over here...!") restricteddata provides a good reading list. You might also look into the Society for the History of Technology. Their journal, Technology and Culture, has articles that often contain a good bit of theory, their student rates are not steep, and there are some prizes for work by new scholars.