The capacity of technology to shape all of us and our world.
That is one factor that makes the use of any tools very complicated.
Tool Complexes | Table of influences | Formula | Historic changes | Conclusion | Topic index
Novel inventions may solve problems
This crucial point is based on the power of technology to affect landscape, labor and capital (wealth) in four distinct manners or ways.
Pacey describes the impact of three planes or dimensions of tools intersecting and as they converge on the individual they have an enormous influence on personal habits and identity.
Tools then are more than technical devices, they include hidden organizational influences and even more deeply masked symbolic influences on how we communicate our beliefs, ideas and needs to each other.
Technological complexity seen as a matrix of relations that can change each other and the entire web-like structure of tools as the material manifestations of problem solving techniques.
Problems may be solved in four ways (facets of technology) affecting three different bases or foundations of values:
| facets or aspects | Formula: |
Land |
x |
Labor
= |
Capital |
|
1 |
Personal | ||||
|
2 |
Technical | ||||
|
3 |
Organizational | ||||
|
4 |
Cultural | ||||
In the above matrix or table, the four aspects (facets) of technology Pacey identifies are aligned to natural, human and commercial resources. Tools affect landscape, labor relations and capital formation because any mix of inventions includes the use of tools and new devices that form a larger cluster of technical implements we call "a tool complex."
Thus any group of related inventions comprise a tool complex that has widespread influences on individuals, landscapes, working conditions, and wealth.
Tool complexes are collections of related devices, inventions and implements that emerge in particular areas based on local conditions, indigenous materials, vernacular styles, specific regional knowledge and varying levels of expertise.
The formula is that landscape when multiplied (mixed with labor yields, or equals) wealth or capital. Thus capital may accumulate where land and labor are combined in such a manner as to create surplus resources or materials we call produce or products.
These influences on individuals,
landscapes, working conditions, and wealth arise from the power of tools to
solve one problem while generating new problems.
This source of technology's power may be thought of as a cube or three dimensional matrix, where the red side in the picture is the tool itself, the green side is the capacity of tools to organize our lives by organizing space and time an and the white side of the cube at right is the imaginative facet of technology to evoke emotions and touch our deepest, hidden, feelings about ourselves and reality.
As a matrix, the source of the power of tools have to reshape us an the world should be conceived of as Rubric's cube in that changing any one element in this matrix affects all of the other facets of tools and technology. That is why as technology is used to solve one problem, new problems are created. Thus all technology has the adaptive power to manipulate us and be manipulated by us in surprising ways.
Consider the adoption of Asian tools and the impact they had on cultural expressions of value, service and power:
Feudalism (1000-1450) spread and was maintained by the adoption of a steel plow, stirrups and cross-bow adapted from Asian implements, since stirrups, for example allowed armored men to ride a horse.
Commercialism (1450-1850) eventually spread due in part to the introduction of paper, movable type, banking, the compass, insurance, precious metal and a widespread use of the clock later turned into watches.
Mechanization (1550-1880), based originally on clocks, mills and the motive power of wind and water, increased production of grain into flour, wood into charcoal, timber into lumber and ore into iron, created cottage industries until 1700s. Then, due to the use of steam engines and their efficient modification by James Watt, in 1750, both manufacture and transportation were altered completely
Automation (1780s-1980s) relying at first on Evan's mill for grinding wheat and spread originally by changes in spinning and weaving in the textile industry (cloth for clothing) the use of self regulating control devices spread from the steam engine, to the telegraph, railway signals, telephones, automotive assembly and eventually aircraft, aeronautical engineering and space flight. The widespread use of computers, robots and voice recognition systems are all automated responses to replacing human hands, eyes or ears in the assembly manufacture, distribution, and implementation processes.
Conclusion
Technology can spread both contentment and discontent. This dual capacity is due to the ability of inventions to ease living conditions yet spread discontent because of the equal power of inventions to alter work habits, ways of earning a living and entire means of accumulating valued products or experience in any society where new inventions are made or adapted.
Freud wrote Civilization and its Discontents, and E. M Forrester, The Machine Stops, partly in response to "utopian" visions of technology as perfecting society as portrayed by Jules Verne or H. G. Wells.
Similarly, Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein during the 19th century, in part, to counter the optimism inherent in the newly emerging faith in progress.
The faith in progress was expressed in writers such as the Marquis de Condorcet and William Godwin who professed the perfectibility of humankind through the new tools. These manufacturing toos were displayed in a book by Dalembert, the mathematician and that Diderot the author where theur uses were explained in their famous Encyclopedia in the late 18th century.
There were originally 17 volumes of text and 11 volumes of plates with one or two new volumes being printed each year between 1751 and 1772. The great Encyclopédie was the most ambitious publishing enterprise of the century. It promoted the new view of scientific empiricism -- the concept that one should rely on observation and experiment, especially in the natural sciences. Such ass this depction of working conditions in a card making shop, below.
Technology has the dual ability to both worsen and improve conditions if you know what to look for in describing its many dimensions and three transformations of natural, human and commercial resources.
History of Technology: Week One
History of Technology: Week Two
History of Technology: Week Three
Related topics:
Links
Technology, what is it and how does it perform are broadly discussed
dates that define periods in the history of technical changes.
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| Tools of Toil: what to read. | ||
| Tools are historical building blocks of technology. | ||
Pursell | Pacey | Postman | Kaku
