David E. Nye is Professor of American History at the University of Southern Denmark and the winner of the 2005 Leonardo da Vinci Medal of the Society for the History of Technology.
I read the first chapter of Technology Matters and thought about Nye's ideas. He starts by saying that learning to use tools was a crucial development for homo sapiens; "technologies are not foreign to 'human naure' but inseparable from it". While animals are content with simply living, humanity has fashioned itself with tools for social evolution, not necessity.
Nye explains that technology is not just objects but also the skills needed to use them; daily life requires knowledge of a lot of tools and machines. Tools precede written language and are known through the body (in a sensory way) as much as they are understood through the mind (by visual description). Reading an object requires different skills to using it.
He claims that making/using a tool requires mental projection of a sequence similar to the composition of a narrative; both emerged many millennia ago and both are needed to construct a cultural world. To think of a tool is to imagine change and to explain a tool (and how to use it) requires narrative. Nye asks, what came first, and concludes they must have developed symbiotically. He comments on the adoption of tools from other cultures and the way that some objects belonging to other cultures would have no apparent use for us; we don't know the story behind them.
Nye discusses the technological feat of Stonehenge before leaving behind prehistory to discuss the etymology of the word technology. Aristotle used 'techne' in his Nicomachean Ethics and defined it as "a productive quality exercised in combination with true reason". He related the crafts to the sciences but generally the Greeks considered practical work/ invention far superior to philosophical thought. I have to wonder how far Nye is correct here, as obviously the Greeks were great inventors and skilled builders. The Romans certainly valued such things more highly; their poets praised the construction of roads and villas.
Nye's concise history of technology continues with some Medieval thinkers, applying Arabic thought which presented the crafts as a practical science, to their own iron-smelting and advances in farming. Roger Bacon imagined flying machines and submarines in his Communia Mathematica and came close to reversing the hierarchy of speculative thought over useful craft. Nye tells us that centuries later in the Renaissance, another Bacon (Francis) imagined a perfect society in which groups of scientists advised the king. This inspired the Royal Society (established 1662).
Technology can be harmful as well as constructive, as Nye demonstrates through the example of the atom bomb. We cannot 'unlearn' this harmful technology, only hope to lose or forget the practical skills to make them. He claims technology is misunderstood, assumed to be applied science. It is rapidly becoming this, but it was not always the case. Thomas Edison is used as an example, as he built his electrical system without mathematical equations; other people worked these out afterwards!
According to David Nye the term technology is a relatively new one. It first emerged in English in the 17th century and was used in the title of Jacob Bigelow's book Elements of Technology in 1829 but was hardly used until after the first World War. Nye comments on how thoroughly technology is shaped by gender, an idea he claims is ofter overlooked. Historically, women always worked in crafts and trades but were eventually displaced by men. When the word technology acquired its present meaning in the 19th Century it gained male connotations, therefore measuring the marginalization of women alongside the rise of industrialisation. Nye argues that although there were female inventors in the USA they were excluded from universities and could only work in labs, factories and hospitals as assistants. Engineering was defined culturally as purely masculine.
Nye closes this chapter by saying that 'technology' remains a slippery term, having only become a part of everyday English little more than 100 years ago. It was used in an 'unstable' way throughout the 2nd half of the 20th Century, having more than one meaning. He finishes by introducing 'technological determinism' using this clip from Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey to illustrate that all technology could be determined by the initial use of tools by apes.
David E. Nye, Technology Matters (MIT Press, 2007). p1-31
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