Narratives of Technology

J. M. van der Laan

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137437068
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book documents and investigates the stories we have told and continue to tell about technology-now the dominant feature of our civilization-in fiction, non-fiction, film, and advertising. It answers important questions about the meanings people ascribe to technology, the hopes and fears we express in the different narratives, the effect of those narratives upon us, and the new forms of myth those narratives represent. Narratives of Technology offers an approach grounded in the humanities, adding another perspective to that of social scientists and technologists.

© The Author(s) 2016

J. M. van der LaanNarratives of Technology10.1057/978-1-137-43706-8_1

Begin Abstract

1. The Reality of Technology

J. M. van der Laan¹

(1)

Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, Illinois State University, Normal, Illinois, USA

End Abstract

“They think it also necessary

that he should understand all the mechanical arts.”

(Tommaso Campanella, The City of the Sun, 1602)

A Very Brief History

Technology has been with us since time immemorial, since the first human beings began to use sticks, stones, and fire, or began to make primitive tools, clothing, and structures for shelter. Indeed, “technology is as old as man himself” (Forbes 11). From the beginning, we have invented and employed it as a means to an end, to extend our abilities, our reach, and our power over the natural world, even over other human beings. Indeed, the pioneer of technological historiography Conrad Matschoss noted in his history of the steam engine (1901) that the goal of technology is dominion (or power) over the earth (cf. 15). The story about the Greek mathematician, engineer, and inventor Archimedes (of the third century BC) illustrates how technology has always been about increasing our physical capabilities as well as how magnificent we think our technological inventions are. Archimedes supposedly made the extravagant claim that if he had the place to position himself, he would be able to move the whole earth with a lever. Lewis Mumford, a prominent twentieth-century analyst of technology, considered him “the prince of technicians” (Pentagon 243).

With the lever and hammer, we increased our strength, with the wheel and sail our mobility and range of travel, with irrigation and fertilization our harvests—to name only a few ways technology has assisted and benefited us. In addition to the physical or material advantages such technologies provided, others such as the alphabet and writing—not to mention the number system—enabled us to extend our mental or intellectual abilities as well. In one of their essays in the voluminous Technology in Western Culture, Melvin Kranzberg and Carroll Pursell point out that Homo sapiens, or Man the Thinker, is also and “cannot be distinguished from Homo faber, Man the Maker” (“Importance of Technology” 8).

From simple beginnings—basic tools of wood and stone for hunting, fire for warmth and cooking, plant materials and animal skins for clothing, simple structures built for shelter, and pottery for transportation and storage of goods—we progressed over time to more complex tools, clothing, structures, and so on. This trajectory has often been written shorthand with the common labels of historical epochs. As Kranzberg and Purcell observe, “the very terms by which we measure the progress of civilization—Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age, and even Atomic Age—refer to a developing technological mastery by means of his environment” (“Importance of Technology” 8). We call our own time the Information Age, Digital Age, or Age of Technology per se. Implicit in this categorization and taxonomy is the notion of progress and advance of some sort from stone to copper, bronze, iron, plastic, and silicon. Typically, we have identified technology with tools and the kinds of tools we use.

Some of the great milestones or turning points in our technological advance are as fundamental as agriculture, the number system, the alphabet, and the wheel. The rise of the city could be mentioned here as well. Other seminal events include the yoke, the stirrup, the mechanical clock, double-entry bookkeeping, gunpowder, optics for telescopes and microscopes, the printing press, the steam engine, the railroad, electricity, the telegraph, the automobile and airplane, radio and television, plastics, antibiotics, the solid-state transistor, the silicon computer chip, the personal computer, and the Internet. There are, of course, many more examples I could cite here.

The path leading to our present technological existence is a long one. The scientific revolution of the European Renaissance launched by the likes of Copernicus (1473–1553), Galileo (1564–1642), Kepler (1571–1630), and Vesalius (1514–1564) helped bring the technological world into being (Winner, Autonomous Technology 5). With the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, humanity took an enormous step closer to a life characterized, if not determined, by technology. Arnold Gehlen maintains that there have really only been two watersheds in the history of technology. That is, there were essentially only two transformations of technology and our relation to it that fundamentally altered the individual, society, and culture. The first was the transition from nomadic hunting and gathering to the settled existence of agriculture and domesticated animals; and the second from that form of life to the introduction and establishment of industrialism or mechanized industry (Gehlen 94). Wolfgang Schivelbusch considers the Industrial Revolution to be an epoch already “permeated and even overwhelmed by technology” (170). By the end of the nineteenth century, we were well underway to the new world of technology we would come to inhabit in our own time. Today, technology is extensive, ubiquitous, and pervasive. As Ray Kurzweil observes, “computers are diagnosing electrocardiograms and medical images, flying and landing airplanes, controlling the tactical decisions of automated weapons, making credit and financial decisions, and being given responsibility for many other tasks that used to require human intelligence” (8). We now use and rely on technology in every sphere of life: from agriculture, energy, medicine, telecommunications, and transportation to business, education, finance, politics, and psychology.

Although we rarely, if ever, think about it, we live in a world saturated by technology. The actual reach and extent of technology is truly remarkable. David Nye illumines our situation and deserves to be quoted here at length. “In everyday life,” he writes,

technologies mediate almost all experience from the moment one awakens until going to sleep at night. Much of what one sees is subtly shaped by the spectra of light thrown by different types of bulbs and fluorescent tubes. The air itself is heated, cooled, or dehumidified according to the needs of the location and the season. What one hears is muffled, amplified, or otherwise mediated by man-made materials, and a good deal of this sound is transmitted by radio, stereo, television, computer, or telephone. The shape, texture, and taste of the orange juice, eggs, coffee, and English muffin one eats for breakfast have been modified by a myriad practices, including the breeding and feeding of animals, the use of food additives and preservatives, and the transformation of raw foodstuffs into products at processing plants. When leaving in the morning, few people directly experience much of the weather; they see it through the windows of cars, buses, and trains on the way to school or work, where “reality” is increasingly defined by telephones and computer screens. (Technology Matters 194)

Technology is, so to speak, the environment in which we now live.

A Provisional Definition

So what exactly is technology? How do we at least begin to define it in order to know what we are dealing with and talking about? When we speak of technology today, cell and smart phones, computers and the Internet come to mind immediately, especially because information technology is at the heart of technology today, but technology includes tools and machines in general as well as organizational methods and bureaucratic procedures which establish regularity or order and maximize efficiency. With this chapter, I do not offer some new theory or philosophy of technology. Other books perform that service and, to be honest, a truly new theory or philosophy has not been published in recent decades. The contours of the discussion have remained essentially the same over the course of the last half century or so. In consequence, I furnish an epitome of what has been written by some leading minds about technology and its defining features.

Most people today would use technology itself and turn first to the Internet, Google, and Wikipedia for a definition of the word. So let us do the same. Wikipedia reports that

Technology is the making, modification, usage, and knowledge of tools, machines, techniques, crafts, systems, methods of organization, in order to solve a problem, improve a preexisting solution to a problem, achieve a goal, handle an applied input/output relation or perform a specific function. It can also refer to the collection of such tools, machinery, modifications, arrangements and procedures. (http://​en.​wikipedia.​org/​wiki/​Technology)

The Wikipedia entry continues, but the opening sentences give a sense of the wide range of meanings technology can have.

The word “technology” acquired its more or less modern meaning only a few centuries ago. In London in 1704, John Harris published his Lexicon Technicum: Or, An Universal English Dictionary of Arts and Sciences in two volumes. This work must be considered the first technical dictionary. In “The Preface” to the first edition, he relates some of the areas he covers: besides methods of calculation and measurement, he documents “the Laws of Motion,” “the Doctrine of Mechanicks, Nature, and Properties of Staticks,” “the way of Calculation of Automata, or Clock and Watch-work” (n.p.). He also describes various tools or “Mathematical and Philosophical Instruments such as “Telescopes, Microscopes, Baroscopes, Hygroscopes, and the Pneumatick-Engines, or Air-Pumps” (n.p.). Harris defined “Technical” as “sometimes the same with Artificial, and expresses whatever relates to the Arts and Sciences, as the Terms, Rules, &c. So that the Terms of Art are commonly called Technical Words” (n.p.). While this definition anticipates, it does not yet comprehend what we have come to mean by technology.

Although the Oxford English Dictionary records use of the word “technology” as early as 1612, it cites the sixth edition of Edward Phillips’ The New World of Words or Universal English Dictionary of 1706 as one of the earliest sources for a definition of the word in a sense we recognize. His brief definition of Technology as “a Description of Arts, especially the Mechanical” indicates something of the meaning it would later come to have. Similarly, the term Technologie appears in the great German encyclopedia of the eighteenth century which Johann Heinrich Zedler compiled, his Grosses vollständiges Universal Lexikon aller Wissenschaften und Künste (Great Universal Lexicon of all Sciences and Arts, 1732 ff.), a resource comparable to the famous French Encyclopedie of Diderot and D’Alembert (1751 ff.). Zedler explains the term primarily in terms of discourse and as “theory of artificial words” (“Kunst-Wörter-Lehre”), but he obliquely connects it as well to handicrafts (pp. 508–509). (The French Encyclopédie does not contain entries for technique or technologie.) Although it already belonged to the English and German lexicon, it was not until Johann Beckmann published his Anleitung zur Technologie (Introduction to Technology) in 1777 for a German readership that “technology” came to be established as a term, a concept, even a field of study. Beckmann expanded and elaborated on the word and the idea: “Technology is the science which teaches the processing of natural materials, or the knowledge of the handicrafts” (3rd ed., p. 17; my translation). He equates technology with knowledge and juxtaposes it with the things of nature. It does not yet have the full meaning it has today, but his book deals with various handicrafts and describes assorted processes of manufacture, so that the concept already has something of the sense it would later acquire. The first monograph in English about technology is Jacob Bigelow’s Elements of Technology published in Boston in 1829. The subtitle explains both the origination of the publication and its intended use: “taken chiefly from a course of lectures delivered at Cambridge, on the application of the sciences to the useful arts: now published for the use of seminaries and students.” This book, like Beckmann’s, suggests the sense of technology as applied science in handicrafts.

In “The Importance of Technology,” Kranzberg and Pursell provide a working definition for technology as we understand it today: “In its simplest terms, technology is man’s efforts to cope with his physical environment … and his attempts to subdue or control that environment by means of his imagination and ingenuity in the use of available resources” (4–5). Technology, they explain, “is much more than tools and artifacts, machines and processes. It deals with human work, with man’s attempts to satisfy his wants by human actions on physical objects” (6). They, moreover, emphasize the important point that technology “involves the organization as well as the purpose of labor” (6). Briefly stated, technology comprises tools, artifacts, and mechanisms as well as procedures, techniques, and methods that allow human beings to enhance and extend their physical and mental abilities so as to possess power over and to control nature, even each other. I should add that technology now plays an enormous role in human leisure activity as well as work.

In spite of so many previous attempts to define it, we continue to feel a need to explain and elaborate what the concept technology means. For example, Stephan J. Kline attempted to answer the question “What is Technology?” with a brief summation in the Bulletin of Science, Technology, and Society (1985). In contemporary English usage, he observed, the word was “being used to represent things, actions, processes, methods and systems” (215). According to him, technology now has essentially four meanings: (1) manufactured articles, (2) the process and system of manufacturing those articles, (3) techniques or methods, and (4) sociotechnical systems of use (215–216). The emphasis he places on system is especially important (more about which below). Along with others who have done so, he identifies the extension of human capacities as a key feature of technology (217).

As the presence of technology in our lives continues to increase, we realize more and more that we need to come to terms with it. In The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves (2009), for example, W. Brian Arthur once again addresses the issue. For him, it is “the methods, practices, and devices a culture uses to make things function” (27). More specifically, he identifies three main features. According to him, technology is (1) “a means to fulfill a human purpose”; (2) an “assemblage of practices and components”; and (3) “the entire collection of devices and engineering practices available to a culture” (28). The word “means” denotes for him also “a device, or method, or practice” (29). Defined as “a means to a purpose,” technology then encompasses “business organizations, legal systems, monetary systems, and contracts” (51), since they are all means to purposes. Here, he is describing what we can call non-material technologies. The emphasis he places on means and purposes, or what we generally refer to as means and ends, is a key issue in any consideration of technology. Further, the relation of means to ends is a fundamental concern taken up in later chapters of this book.

One of the most important writers on technology was the French theorist and critic, Jacques Ellul. He preferred to use the word, technique, but its meaning has been subsumed in English usage today into the generic term, technology. In The Technological Society (first published in 1954 as La Technique ou l’enjeu du siecle), he distinguishes among several subdivisions for modern technology: (1) mechanical, (2) economic, (3) organizational, and (4) human (22). According to him, its defining feature is efficiency or “the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity” (xxv). So understood, technology is the realm where tools, machines, and techniques all combine. In his second book on the subject, The Technological System (1977), Ellul summarized and epitomized his point: “Wherever there is research and application of new means as a criterion of efficiency, one can say that there is a technology” (26). Efficiency means improved performance, functioning, or operation—whether of a mechanical object or of a social organization such as a school, a government, or a business—which means doing or producing more quicker, easier, as well as cheaper and which simply equates with doing more better. To achieve efficiency, technology necessitates precision, quantification, standardization, reliability, and objectivity.

While there are many other authors I could call on here for definitions and clarifications, these suffice for a foundational and general understanding of what technology is. In sum, technology allows us to change conditions in nature, but also “to bring about change in the economy, in society, in education, warfare, and so on” (Drucker 19). That is, we seek to control our various environments with technology. In a word, it affords us power. Indeed, technology enables and enhances the exercise of human power by design (see Hans Jonas 81).

Material and Non-Material Technology

Today (and at least for the time being), we identify and consider everything pertaining to our digital devices and systems as technology, but it is no longer so easy for us to recognize a simple cup or hat or scissors as such. It is even more difficult to perceive and understand that there are non-material technologies such as planning and organization. Friedrich Jünger helps to understand this aspect of technology. “By definition,” he writes, “technology is really nothing but a rationalization of the work process” (12). Rationalization here essentially means organization to increase efficiency. Ellul used the term “human techniques” (Society, 85 ff.) for this dimension of technology and calls planning “the technical method” (Society 184). Neil Postman called such methods “invisible” technologies (Technopoly 123), as we are typically not aware of them as such. However we care to label them, they must be recognized as forms of technology. In this category belong advertising, economic planning, education, law, political organization, and psychological therapy. Michel Foucault’s ideas about techniques of discipline and mechanisms of power speak to features of non-material technology as well (cf. Discipline and Punish, 1977; Power/Knowledge, 1980).

According to Ellul, technology “transforms everything it touches into a machine” (Society 4). He means that it “mechanizes” everything it encounters (12). Wherever technology extends its reach, the machine model establishes itself. Everything, everyone, and every situation becomes something to be engineered, standardized, regularized—made to operate like a machine. Non-material technology mechanizes activities or behaviors. It is a mechanization of life through rationalization, organization, measurement, assessment, standardization, and statistical analysis. Organization as management or bureaucracy is simply a mechanization of human relations and activity. Indeed, management is really only a term of technological culture. Management and the systematic processes of bureaucracy are tools used to achieve a desired effect, or as Arthur writes, they are “means to a purpose,” and they work like a mechanism with the interlinking and replaceable parts of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. The Reality of Technology
• 2. Narrative and Myth
• 3. The Dominant Narrative
• 4. A Counter-Narrative
• 5. Literary Narratives
• 6. Faust and Technological Fulfillment
• 7. Frankenstein and Technological Failure
• 8. Movies, Machines, and Human Beings
• 9. Advertising Technology
• 10. The Transformation of Narrative
• Backmatter