What is Technology?

I feel the most important thing about technology is not what it does or how fast it works, but how it influences and quite often changes people. Since the year 2000 (y2k) we have not been able to avoid technology. It advances in spite of ethics, in spite of personal beliefs, in spite of everything.

We throw the word technology around a lot today. What does it mean and why do we use it so much? Those of you who are old enough to know what life was like before computers might understand what I'm getting at. In the 1960s, when I was growing up, an automobile had an electrical system for starting, to supply a spark for combustion and to supply power to lights, radio and heater. Today that electrical system has become automotive technology. It seems that everything today has become some kind of technology. We had technologies in the past; mechanical, electrical, plumbing, carpentry, etc, but it has only been recently that we have started using the word technology more pervasively.

The word technology comes from the Greek root word techno - which meant (in ancient Greece): art, skill, craft, method, system, and Greek ology - indicating science or study¹. Before the 20th century, the term technology usually referred to the description or study of the Useful Arts². Useful Arts were concerned with the skills and methods of practical subjects such as manufacturing and craftsmanship. Useful Art is an antonym to performing art and the fine art.

I think I could say that everyone uses some kind of art, or skill or craft every day. Just picking out the clothes you will wear is part art and part skill. Dressing correctly is a useful art. Driving a car to work involves skill, another useful art. As you can see, a dictionary definition of technology doesn’t really tell us much about what it is today.

Through the ages our technology has been based on many different things. First there were our human senses and muscles, then came primitive hand tools, then horse or ox power, running water, steam, internal combustion, and now, electricity. Also through the ages, our knowledge base of technology has been increasing through the application of ideas, life experience and new information to what we already knew. Today we gain knowledge much faster than we can fully understand it or even catalog it for future learning.

Archeology gives us a glimpse of early technologies -- arrowheads, knife blades and hide scrapers made from flint rock. If you just randomly banged flint against another rock, you may eventually make a usable tool. That may very well be how the development of stone tools started. But to efficiently make a tool, early man learned techniques of angles and strength applied to the blows which allowed him to make his tools faster and better. Also, once a tool is made, man has to learn how to use it efficiently and effectively.

I think a better definition of modern technology is: Technology is human knowledge which involves creating tools, processing actions, making materials and systems to solve problems and benefit society.

Technology is about taking action or actions to meet a human need rather than merely understanding the workings of the natural world, which is the goal of science. Technology is much more than just scientific knowledge. It includes values (numerical,theoretical & practical) as much as facts, practical craft knowledge and art as well as theoretical knowledge. Technology also involves organized ways of doing things. It covers the intended and unintended interactions between products (machines, devices, artifacts) and the people and systems who make them, use them or are affected by them through various processes.

There is no one master discipline called Technology. Today, technical matters are threaded through almost every discipline. But the diversity of science, mathematics and art does not allow for a singularity of technology. The term technology is just a "catch-all" phrase that is wide and everyone has their own way of understanding the meaning of it.