What is Technology?

In this post, I will investigate the question: What is a technology?

There’s no doubt – our technologies are powerful. They extend human capacity in amazing and also terrifying ways.

In order to fully understand technology’s importance in culture and society we should remember that it’s a product of human activity, specifically scientific research, made durable through time and space. We can use this understanding to look past the astonishing things technologies seem to do to us, and think about what we do in designing, building and using technologies.

What’s understood as a “technology” changes over time. In Plato’s Phaedrus Socrates decried the technology of the written word - books. He lived in an oral tradition where the memorization of knowledge, communicated directly between individuals, was the standard. He said that writing is better suited for entertainment - that it doesn’t foster deep thought.

Nowadays books are supposed to make people smart. What technology now threatens the sanctity of deep thought? Nicolas Carr’s article in the Atlantic attempts an answer. It’s titled, “Is Google Making us Stupid?”. Carr wrote a book based on his article, but I’m not sure Socrates would be convinced that Carr’s book will make us any smarter.

Throughout history technologies have been commonly understood as powerful determinants of our society’s social structure, cultural values, and even intelligence. As if the technologies stand apart from the world, have their own internal evolution separate from societal influence, and have direct influence on all aspects of our lives. The academic term for this phenomenon is Technological Determinism.

This popular view of technology is reductionist. Again, I'm arguing that the most fruitful question is what we do with our technologies, compared to what they do to us. This thinking helps us move past a surface-level understanding of technologies, which views technology as either the savior or destroyer of humankind. However, our collective fate is ultimately up to us, and how we use our machines.

This doesn’t mean that technologies are entirely neutral. If we look closely at the reality of their design and construction, we can analyze all the choices that went into the products we use and rely on every day. What are the political, economic, and cultural forces affecting the design of smartphones, or of social networking software? Let’s look behind the curtain. Without thinking about the people that make our technologies, we’re stuck doing something we know doesn’t get us very far – we’re judging a book by its cover.

I’ll leave you with a few questions for you to consider:

• Is there anything you’d now describe as a technology that you hadn’t previously?
• Why is it important to understand various things we take for granted, like books, as a technology?