Defining Technology

Here I will try to offer a concise and effective definition of technology and several of its features. The difficulty of this comes from technology’s soluble nature. Upon adoption, successful technologies become essential to both worldviews and ways of life. They retreat into obscurity as part of the foundation of what is and can be. I also do not want to anthropocentrize such statements — non-humans are also users of technology, as the house-mouse takes its name from the artificial environment which makes its existence possible, and the bird depends on artificial structures like the nest to raise its young, and so on.

In plainest terms, technology is the means an organism takes to command environments. Even more concisely, technology the effecting of strata. These strata may be physical or immaterial, in that they make up both the material environment and the mental or noetic landscape. Technology involves the apprehension of what is (strata unaffected) and transformation to what may be (new, artificial strata). In this way, technology is domesticated and made mundane.

Material and Mental Stratum

Technology is embedded with affordances on behalf of the one who implements it, and so carries with it a measure of intentionality. These intentions are necessary for the effectiveness of technologies — birds who build nests with curved ridges, for instance, do so in order to prevent their eggs from falling out. Without these ridges the nest would not function. Likewise, a lock is an explicitly functional artifact with the intention to only open for the possessor of the correct key. This is a consistent, material state of being directed towards the actions of others. It is only natural for gravity to cause the eggs to fall. A mother bird intends for her offspring to survive, and transforms the nest to hold them safe. The material is now intentional in her stead.

This is also true of technology which affects mental strata. The “discipline” of science is a directed effort to achieve understanding through various means. Various disciplines are composed of various ideas which instruct us as to what is and is not possible through their use. Internal medicine contains various sub-disciplines which address different strata of the body. Within these sub-disciplines are disputes reflecting the believed intentionality of the body — psychiatry, cognitive behavioral therapy, and psychoanalysis all contain different prescriptions, or intended uses for solving personality problems.

The Cultural Stratum

Technology’s ability to effect and transform strata, and the new prescriptions towards ideal strata leads to its soluble nature. It becomes difficult to separate the “natural” and the “unnatural” or artificial (in this case, artificial being anything affected by intentionality). Time and intention transforms strata from the artificial into a new natural. This is why the past is often jokingly referred to as “a foreign country” — nostalgia and curiosity about how things were done historically comes from the an acknowledgement that the old normal was truly alien to the present. Slavery, child labor, poor sanitation, high infant mortality, and so on were not so remarkable as they are to us. People were born into and socialized to these and other horrible conditions.

People today have similar hopes that our worst conditions will disappear with time. The ubiquitous yet attractive quality of technology today (in the form of consumer electronics) lead us to what Morozov calls “solutionism” or the recognition of only problems we believe are solely solvable by technology (To Save Everything Click Here). We conflate technological expertise with the ability to address problems like those mentioned above (child labor, poor sanitation, high infant mortality, etc). Here is where I have to reiterate my definition of technology. It is the effecting of strata, and the means to take command of environments. It is not merely artifacts used to solve problems (laws, water treatment plants, vaccinations), but the conceptual tools which transform the cultural stratum and what is acceptable, or sensible.

All present strata are indebted to technology, but the cultural stratum carries with it a set of dimensions which solidify an essentially technical character to being human. We can see in places abandoned by people how nature and ecosystems will overtake the physical environment. Abandoned buildings and towns return to nature, as eventually artificial structures erode and are repurposed by plants and animals until they are absolutely lost (at which point archaeologists are necessary to rediscover them).

Cultural stratum are also transformed by time, but technologies are seldom totally lost. Instead, they gravitate towards a new natural, as I have argued above. We can distinguish between classes and types of technology in that the most “successful” of them become both involuntary to being, and increasingly formalized or standardized. The variation in animal technologies results from the available material, but the structural arrangement is uniform in that a nest recognizably a nest. These birds will not reject the use of such structures, since it is essential to their survival. Likewise, certain human technologies become involuntary and formalized. Refusing them is a fast route to becoming insensible or illegible to society. One cannot survive in a human environment if they reject the use of such technologies. In the developed world, technologies that make up our infrastructure are like this — electrical grids, plumbing systems, and (western) medicine are seen as natural to how we live, rather than artificial impositions on the environment. Technologies like governance and identity documents are also involuntary and completely formalized, to the degree that deviance is absolutely criminalized.

The alternative to a formalized or standardized technology is expressive. These are technologies that allow the user to engage them with a fair bit of improvised, experimental agency, and carries less strict intentionality. Food need not be cooked exactly the same way with exactly the same materials. Likewise, hygiene, architecture and clothing are necessary to sensible and intelligible participation in society, but there is a tremendous amount of variation in what is possible, to the degree that they can make expressive cultural statements. But those who experiment with such technologies too much or outright refuse them fall outside the purview of intelligible human society — the ugly home rejected by a homeowner’s association, the person who refuses to wash their hair in favor of “natural oils,” those who refuse to eat meat or people who must live in boxes are all viewed with varying suspicion and scrutiny by others. Deviancy and refusal of a formalized technology is sometimes possible with fewer consequences than formalized tech.

Technology may also be formalized but voluntary. Here we see political processes, transportation and media. Each offers largely formalized intentionality to the user, but one does not need to engage with them at all to be sensible to society. If I want to make a call, I have to cooperate with a telephone network, I must agree to terms of service to use email, and I have to buy a stamp to send a letter. If I want to travel by highway, I cannot ride my bicycle on the US Interstate. In the US, voting is not compulsory. These are all technologies I must engage with on the terms of others, but I am not compelled to use these things (although I often must in order to achieve my own goals).

Refusal

A threshold of refusal runs between technology that is expressive and involuntary and technology that is voluntary but formal. This means that what we find sensible rests with the adoption and use of technology that are formal and involuntary, and people will tolerate some deviance and refusal for technologies that have not been naturalized in this way. But as I have argued, the measure of a “successful technology” is its ability to drift towards a state of involuntary and formal use, so that it becomes naturalized and mundane. We seldom question the use of such artifacts and the technology behind them. In such cases, the critique often relates to what Langdon Winner describes as the only acceptable reasons for limiting a technology — if it affects our health; threatens to exhaust a resource, “natural species and wilderness areas that ought to be preserved”; degrades the natural environment (air, land, water); or causes exaggerated social stresses. (The Whale and the Reactor, pp. 50–51).

Instead, the developed world accepts the “natural” created by technology and evangelizes the new social virtues of sensibility it creates. This is why discourse around the “digital divide” involves the disparity of access to technology and “information” (or knowledge defined as important by the new mental stratum). It does not recognize alternatives to the developed world as legitimate ways of life in their own right, but instead assumes the moral authority technology affords to developed society and tries to extend that to others. Refusers, resisters and other non-users (as outlined by Sally Wyatt, Eric Baumer and others) either engage in insensible lifestyle choices or are limited by their own strata and need only be delivered by technology (as defined and understood in the western, developed context).

Conclusion

Technology is the means by which an organism takes to command environments and effects strata. As a means of persistent influence and change in the world grants it has both intentionality and agency. It retreats into obscurity with adoption and becomes mundane. I have outlined three strata in which this happens — physical/material, mental/noetic, and cultural. Within the cultural are dimensions of formality/expressiveness, and voluntary/involuntary technologies. The dominance of the western and developed world’s concept of technology has set certain thresholds for individual human agency, by setting boundaries for what technologies are refusable and which make individuals insensible and unintelligible to society upon their refusal.