Nye Reading Response
Engineering Professor Edwin Nye begins his exploration into the world of “technology” through a discussion of its multiplicitous definitions over time. In Chapter One, he questions whether or not we can ever really define “technology” due to the drastic ways its meaning has evolved throughout social history. He claims that it is difficult to “imagine human beings as pre-literate, but it is difficult to imagine them as pre-technological,” providing evidence of humankind’s “upbringing” side-by-side the use of technology, or tools. We come to know every tool we use through the ways it interacts with our body, Nye says. This thought ties nicely into Nye’s citation of Walter Benjamin, who says that “technology is not the mastery of nature but of the relations between nautre and man.” Humankind interacts with nature through the tools that he creates, which in turn affect the social interactions he creates with his peers. The relationship humankind has with technology ultimately feeds into and shares the space that he uses for his social existence. To prove the point he makes in the title of this chapter, Nye delineates the thoughts of both ancient and more contemporary philosophers and scientists, demonstrating that [technology] was not always so closely associated with the digital technology we think of today; in fact, the word “technology” was not adapted until its practice had been in use for quite some time. The idea of technology began, as Aristotle might say, as a “rational faculty” that is equivilant to the production of an art form. If technology is essentially human creation and humankind’s relation to the world, then it is simiultaneously conducting the business of art, which is “to bring something into existence.” The cause of the tool – of the technology or art – lies in the motivations and the inspirations of the creator. Cicero was quoted at one point as saying that in “tools” the human ability “to transform the environment and create a ’second nature’” lies inherent. And again, Stanley Smith says that “technology is more closely related to art than to science – not only materially, because art must somehow involve the selection and manipulation of matter, but conceptually as well, because the technologist, like the artist, must work with unanalyzable complexities.”
The ideas of these people so long before our time definitely parallel to some of the conversations we have been having in class. Although it’s been a recent academic exploration for me, technology is not merely applied science, but it can also be considered as abstract creation – as art! Nye goes on to cite that inventors like Edison often created their “invention” before technical terms were applied to it. In other words, their tools of technology were art forms before they were standard – I might even argue mundane – forms of modern day technology. The evolution of the word “technology” arose out of Germany and graudally evolved into a masculine exclusion principal: where the “useful arts” such as weaving and potterymaking once stood as viable forms for humanity’s relation to the world, industrialization swept in and began to be more intimately tied to a discourse of “technology” that still survives today.
Perhaps the biggest point that Nye tries to make from the first chapter and into his second chapter, “Does Technology Control Us?” is the push-and-pull between the machinated world and the social world. He immediately disproves the inevitability of “technology” to control us by demonstrating the Japanese rejection of the gun during the time of the Samuri, and the similar selective use of farming equipment by the Amish in the United States. There has been a long debate of how technology has shaped social conditions, ranging from Braudel who argues that “technology is only an instrument” that man does not know how to use, to the idea that humans reference their culture to determine how they utilize certain available technological tools. Nye explores Karl Marx’s opinions on technology and the ties he makes to capitalism and socialist revolutions; and then moves into McLuhan, who says that every form of communication (which is a human creation or “tool”) shapes how people view the world.
In response to the debate Nye poses toward the end of the reading, he mentions “externalists” who give technology a large slice of the pie that determines factors of social change. I would argue, in conjunction to our discussion in class, that yes, technology does have a profound effect on the ways in which we approach our social interactions and interpretations of the world around us. Michel Foucault summed up the possibilities of this through his discussion of “discourse,” as mentioned in Nye’s chapter, and how every human being has discourses permanently imbedded into his or her being that determine a relation to the world. At the same time, because technology evolved from the “tools” created by humanity to relate to the world – to employ, reproduce, and reflect on nature – I stand by the belief that social relations and culture can never be absent from the influence of technology. We would never say that art “controls” us, and I think that is what externalist are trying to extrapolate onto the advanced ideas of technology. Humans created technology. We simply have to recognize the great tools we have made, and recognize how to adapt them wisely to our relations both with nature and within it.
Questions for Thought:
1. If technology is indeed primarily an art form, how has popular culture come to dissociate it so much from the conception of “art.”
2. Nye mentioned how the Japanese Samuri claimed that the gun had little symbolic value to their culture at the beginning of Chapter 2. How have different forms of ”technology” come to be symbolically admired in some cultures, but spurned or rejected in others?
3. Why did Nye use the citation of Cicero in Chapter 1 as praising the human ability to “transform the environment and create a ’second nature?’” How does it support the arguments he makes?