David Nye Response
The definition of technology, the evolution of technology, the origins of technology, and the ambiguity of technology were all discussed in the readings from David Nye’s Technology Matters. Nye began his discussion with the fact that Homo sapiens have utilized tools for at least 400,000 years as a means of “social evolution.” He argued that as people have continued to invent more tools, we also continue to redefine “necessity” to include the functions of said tools. To put it blatantly, Nye states that “invention has been the mother of necessity.” Yet Nye proposes that this progression with technology has been essential to our story as human beings. He beautifully crafts the analogy that toolmaking is like storytelling – it is passed down from generation to generation, all the while being enhanced and redefined. The author divulges that the word technology originates from the Greek word techne meaning relating to skill in the arts. He then proceeds to define what art may be – not in his own words but in those of Aristotle who defined art as “a rational faculty exercised in making something… a productive quality exercised in combination with true reason.” In his writing, Nye also introduces Mumford’s theory of the three stages of the evolution of technology. Mumford explained there was the eotechnic era (a water and wood complex), the paleotechnic era (a coal and iron complex), and the neotechnic era (an electricity and alloy complex) that defines the evolution of technology.
In the second chapter of Nye’s book, he touches upon the idea of determinism, which is essentially that every state of affairs is the inevitable consequence of previous causes. With this belief, technological determinism would be the notion that every new invention or advancement in technology provided the inevitable impetus for the next progression, and so on and so forth. Focusing on other theorists, Nye presents that Marx anticipated a better world, perhaps even a utopia, which would be the result of industrialization. However, a flaw in this hypothesis is that Marx did not foresee revolutions and violent class conflicts which would prevent a utopian society. Externalist views were communicated by McLuhan and Toffler who saw technology as an “autonomous force” that would drive society towards change. Finally, Foucalt conveyed the idea of “epistemes,” or seeing history as the “exfoliation of patters of ideas and structures.”
After reading Nye’s chapters, I felt like he had provided the reader with a mountain of background knowledge and history about technology, yet still preserved a humble attitude as he explicitly stated that he couldn’t define it. In a sense, I feel that technology is similar to art; we discussed that art also is lacking a definition in that to define it would be limiting its actual expansiveness and variety. That goes the same for technology. It is such as vast term that to define it would be to exclude part of it. Also, when I read the first chapter I was intrigued and bothered at the same time by Nye’s claim that people continue to redefine “necessity.” After pondering this, I have to completely agree with him. We live in a world where anyone under the age of ten or twelve can’t remember the invention of the iPod, yet cannot live without it; where my generation considers the internet to have always been a household item; where my parents’ generation always grew up with a car parked in the garage. Necessity is constantly redefining itself to meet the exponential growth of technology. I think that while accurate, it is a bit of a cynical statement which reflects the way that people can take technology for granted.
On another note, I found Nye’s inability (or perhaps skepticism) in defining technology to be similar to Raymond Williams’ hesitation to define Nature. In the previous reading, Williams discussed the evolution of Nature and its parallelism to the development of monotheism; in Nye’s passages, he discusses the evolution of technology and its relation to the development of our modern day culture and society. I found this similarity to be quite valid, especially for the topic of our class. There is an intersection between nature, art, and technology, one of those intersections being that none of the three can be perfectly defined because ambiguity is a part of their existence.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT:
- Can the adoption of new technologies actually hinder the progression of society from an ethical viewpoint?
- How can we be immersed in technology from a day to day basis and still not be able to adequately define it?
- Is accepting a belief in determinism the same as concluding that progression in technology is “fate”?