Background"Things are in the saddle and ride mankind."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Edward Muybridge, to settle a wager, took a series of still pictures to capture the position of the horse's feet in an effort to determine if ever all four appendages left the ground simultaneously.
Understanding the order of things
Background
Greek & Indo-European
hominid ancestry
Daedalus, Prometheus, Faust
time as a cycle & as a line
Material change due to: fire, plows, gears, gauges, cars
agricultural, industrial, atomic
Technical things are complicated and ubiquitous:
What is technology?
A cyclical and synergistic relationships among people and things as materials, techniques and symbols, that are capable of generating a related complex of tools in order for people to perform work effectively.
| Combining | Greek Prefix | Greek Suffix |
| words | Techne = Tekne | + logos = logos |
| skill | to bind or tie |
+ the wisdom of |
| thought | putting together pieces rationality | + ratio, reason, |
| practice | dovetailed joinery |
a systematic study |
| creativity | exaptation | logically unrelated combinations |
The relation of tools, techniques, and human values that different people use and have applied in the past to intelligently solving problems based on craft, manufacturing, industrial, or electronic means.
Related words:
Greek Root
| Tekne | architecture | tectonic |
| logos | logistical, logical | log, logarithm |
| Name | Duration over time and character | Consequences & associated ideas |
|
lithic |
• Upper Paleolithic or old stone
age in Africa - Asia & Europe |
craft language |
|
hydric |
• 10,000 years ago until 8th Cent BC -- Hydraulic Civilizations: China, India,Cambodia, Iraq & Egypt, irrigated agriculture |
domestication & urbanization agricultural |
|
florescence |
• 3d Cent BC to 6th Cent AD -- Ancient Han, Roman & Tang: foundations of art, architecture, music, & records |
technical revolution & population explosion |
| Eotechnical |
• High Middle Ages; uses of wind
& water water wheels of fortune windmills Don Quixote & the giants |
Arab transmittals: algebra -- alchemy |
| Paleotechnical |
• 18th & 19th centuries; uses
of coal & coke factories & mines steam engines transportation revolution |
Euro-imperialism: gunpowder & god industrial |
| Neotechnical |
• 19th & 20th centuries; uses
of electricity dynamo & telegraph radio, radiation & electronics |
American imperialism: commerce & imagery atomic |
More on technological time periods.
Lewis Mumford, historian of technological influence and change, divided the recent development of technological civilizations into three phases:
| Eotechnical, the early wind and water powered period before 1500, based on wood as a fuel and vegetation as materials |
| Paleotechnical, or the origins, dawn and dispersal of the industrial revolution based on coal as a fuel and minerals as materials |
| Neotechnical, the automation made possible by electrical machinery and based on oil as a fuel and synthetic materials & fabrics. |
Ways to think about technology
| the use of devices |
dimensions of use | economic factors | social consequences |
| technical |
Land |
resource flows | |
|
* |
the "garden," produce | ||
| technology | organizational |
Labor |
craftsmanship |
|
= |
trade unionism | ||
| cultural symbolism |
Capital |
wealth | |
| tools | Economy | "know how" |
Synonyms for tools
Any collection of related kinds of implements for a similar purpose is called a technological complex
Seen here is a domestic collection of metal pots, pans, buckets,
kettle, baskets and plastic jugs found in a home in a Thai village in the 20th
century.
Appliances
artifacts
devices
effects
fabrications
gadgets
hardware
implements
instruments
items
notions
utensils
weapons
Technological phrases and metaphors:
"pull out all the stops"
A cinch
come through in the clutch
hook, line and sinker
kit & caboodle
screwing around
hijacked
jump start
going overboard
Cultural influences
Deus Ex Machina
means: "the god from the machine."
| radio |
Greek Theatre | ||
|
Greek Temples |
|||
 |
aqueducts |
||
| Steam Engine |
|||
| Medieval Monastery | |||
| Textile manufacturing |  |
Church organs & clocks |
spinning wheels |
Mine drainage pumps |
water wheels |
Technology shapes the world we see, feel, touch, taste & hear.
These five sensory experiences contribute to how and what we
know.
Remember the only sure path through the maze of ingenuity is learning and knowledge.
Sensory experience influences our comprehension of the world.
Technological Imperative: change is inevitable, "get used to it."
Technocratic Elites: those who know keep you from knowing what you need to know
-- hence are you lost?
Technical Virtuosity
When was Chinese technology dominant? 1100-1450
What?
They created iron, paper, locks, compass, rudders, maps, gunpowder
&
used canals, astral clocks, rice, bamboo, tiles and clay fired ceramics
How?
One series of changes in architecture, survival and fine technology, together with their related tools and tool complexes often led, via exaptation, to changes in how tools were crafted and the ways people organized their lives.
Web of technological connections:
|
materials |
||
|
higher efficiency |
ceramic, glass, metal |
irrigated agriculture |
| increase in skilled labor |
 |
food preservation |
|
novel reuse of old tools |
growing wealth | |
|
innovative techniques |
||
|
Cycle
of Change |
||
Social relations
The Labor Theory of Value
Especially in paleolithic, pastoral, and agrarian
cultures the worth 
of anything was determined by the time involved in the processing
or manufacturing of materials to enhance survival, express emotions, or control
behavior.
Value is determined by the duration that elapses as one prepares food, makes implements, or produces things.
The woman in the picture is seated on the floor spinning vegetable fiber (flowers that produce the lint fibre of cotton) into thread. Thread literally and figuratively is the product of a technical process, whereby the skill of the woman exercising a technique with a specialized tool creates a valued item to be used in the manufacture, repair and weaving of cloth. She wears cloth and has adapted (an example of exaptation) a bicycle's spokes and rim to replace the wooden spinning wheel that her ancestors used to convert fibers into usable thread.
The time it takes to transform a natural product (lint of the cotton plant or the wool of a lamb) to a necessary good, in this case cotton thread often determines the cost, price or worth of the yarn, or spun material. Spinning concentrates and thereby strengthens the endurance of the fibers making them useful in the weaving or sewing of cloth.
| Word | definition | synonymous meaning |
| labor | to bring forth a child out of the womb. | Birth |
| the gainful employment of those who work. | Toil | |
| any craft or professional endeavor. |
Vocation |
Technology
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Cultural Values
Historical development of related tools reveals a symbolic expression as displayed in the language and imagery of ideology, religion, and work that shapes the prevailing social mores, or ethos of a period
| Mores | period | characteristics | keystone |
| Sacred | Prehistoric | the cosmos is alive & reflects the image of God. | Art & music |
| Material | Ancient | elements < earth-air-fire-water-wood > comprise all. | Fire |
| Ethical | Ancient | people have an obligation to act with justice to others. | Hunting |
| Commercial | 1500s | the market determines the worth of anything. |
Locks & paper |
| Utilitarian | 1600s | the greatest good for the greatest number. | Algebra |
| Romantic | 1700s | transcendent ideals bind humans to land & all life. | Mechanization |
Triggers are catalysts -- or those key devices that cause behavior or that cause other technical things to change, thus altering behavior as their use becomes widespread.
They are the hinge on the door of the future.
Consider the use of or invention of: fire, plows, gears, gauges, cars all of which profoundly bolster our modern, automated, electronic world.
Depending on the context these catalysts are the ingredients in the quickening pace of change because they allow technological changes to diffuse widely and rapidly among cultures, often leading to social change and economic disturbance.
| Triggers | context | consequences |
| seed protection | gathering food, fiber, fuel & forage | agriculture |
| antikithera device | sacred prognostication of planetary motion | differential gears |
| gunpowder | sacred observance, amusement & defensive strategy | explosives & canons |
| steam engine | the application of a vacuum cylinder to a boiler | power for machinery |
| dynamo | inducing a current in a magnetic field to flow as electrons | electrical power |
Can you determine the trigger, context and consequences for our current period of technological virtuosity?
| Triggers | context | consequences |
What is the role of exaptation in the use of a key element from one technological complex to another?
Reasons why triggers may disperse widely and thus change social behavior and cultural customs:
- Climate,climate changes,sea level altered, storms,frosts, floods, etc.
- Environment, conditions, earthquakes, fires, tsunamis, or availability of materials
- Research and experience, deliberate work plan to invent a thing or process
- Discovery, tinkering, experimentation, inventiveness
- Regulations, patents, rules, taxes or exclusionary tariffs
- Serendipity, chance mistake or discovery (unpredicted)
Thus do things confront our imaginations with a continuous adaptive challenge:
There is no single reason for technological change, because inherent in the relation to tools, work and products is a synergy of forces that propel people, institutions, customs and culture from one period of technical sophistication to another quite different period of reliance on nature, supplemented by keystone technologies that alter our behavior, ideas and living conditions because tools rock the hand that rocks the cradle.
Tools are neither good (Daedalean) nor bad (Promethean) but they do confront us with a devil's bargain (Faustian) every time we think we know more than we actually do about techniques, technical implements and the intelligence required to master our inventions.
Technology includes an array of forces and leverage points that we must learn to comprehend, if we are to understand what it is to be fully human.
Thematic appendix of basic ideas in the course:
tools, artifacts,devices,
implements are synonyms for parts of a technological
assemblage, or tool complex.
technical - organizational - cultural dimensions
Land * Labor * Capital technology
What causes technology to remain static, quicken
and then radically change?
pastoral & agrarian values
Labor theory of value & chronometers
Things like flakes, arrows, fire, art, burial, weaving
are all manifestations triggering tools from our earliest
ancestors.
Index to the above page
definitions
aspects
formula
domestication
time and value
prehistory
Course overview and Technological Complexes
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|---|---|---|
| Tools of Toil: what to read. | ||
| Tools are historical building blocks of technology. | ||
