Technologies Matter

Editorial Statement

This blog is produced by myself, David E. Nye, and it is devoted to technologies understood as part of culture. It is not exclusively about one nation, but it does focus to some degree on the United States, where I am a citizen, and on Denmark, where I live. The word "technology" is not often clearly defined and explained. Therefore, I begin this blog with a brief definition of the word.

Technology

The word "technology" emerged into English from Latin during the seventeenth century to describe systematic study in the applied arts. It was not a widely used term in the eighteenth century, when it was defined as a description of the mechanical arts. In the United States it became a bit more familiar after the publication of Elements of Technology in 1832. It was written by a Harvard University professor, Jacob Bigelow, and for the next decade one finds references to the term primarily in citations of his book. As Leo Marx has observed, "through most of the nineteenth century, the word technology referred to a kind of book," typically a manual that described a particular branch of mechanical knowledge. A few engineering colleges embraced the term, notably the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but it remained unusual. Only at the end of that century did a few sophisticated writers such as Thorstein Veblen begin to use the word to refer to the practical arts collectively, and this conception was not widely adopted until c. 1920.

Before that time, Americans employed other terms to speak about what would later be called technology. They spoke of the "mechanic arts" or the "useful arts" or perhaps "science" in contexts where one might use "technology" today. Thus it was only in the twentieth century that the word began to mean entire systems of machines, and even so at times it is used as an annoyingly vague abstraction that is both cause and effect. More recently, during the 1990s, the unstable meaning of the word was further complicated when journalists and stock market trades began to use "technology" as a synonym for computers, information systems, and digital devices of all kinds. This blog will not use the term in that way.

Within the field of the history of technology, the term is generally understood to refer to techniques, tools, and machines embedded in cultural contexts. Indeed, it is impossible to imagine human beings as pre-technological. All peoples seem to have some tools, such as traps, clothing, weapons, pottery, baskets, ovens, or irrigation systems. All cultures seem to have developed tools to provide shelter, protection, food, warmth, music, art, and entertainment. These devices pre-existed the relatively recent technology of writing, which emerged thousands of years later. Technologies are inseparable from verbal, visual and kinetic systems of meaning, which vary from one culture to another. In short, technologies are inseparable from what it means to be human, but they vary from one group to another. Even within one country, considerable variations are common.

When so defined, technology does not refer to a deterministic system of machines that marches inexorably toward some inevitable result. Rather, technologies are socially constructed, malleable, and constantly evolving. While some authors still espouse deterministic ideas about technology, these are seldom scholars in the history of technology. They do not agree with Karl Marx that new forms of production force society to develop a certain class structure. It is a misguided notion to think that society passes through inevitable stages, such as "Taylorism" and "Fordism,"  Nor do they agree with Marshall McLuhan or others who argue that systems of communication have a decisive effect on the shape of society. 

Through technologies, people can enable diversity, but governments and monopolies can also use technologies to impose uniformity. There is noting inevitable about their adoption and use, whether windows, fences, street railways, light bulbs, radio, computer games, or the Internet. Each can be manufactured, adopted, and used in different ways. The process of incorporation is not only a question of invention, development, and manufacturing but also political, gendered, symbolic, and psychological. 

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For a detailed history of "technology" see Eric Schatzberg, Technology: Critical History of a Concept. University of Chicago Press, 2018.

I reviewed this book in Technology and Culture 61:4 October, 2020, 1212-1213.

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