A promiscuous term

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What is technology? It's an interesting and difficult question to answer. Technology can be anything that's human-made – from a piano to a drain to a mule to a milk cow – or it could mean a particular kind of thing.

Nowadays, the term technology is equated with the digital. Accordingly, technology doesn't equal a mule or a piano, but it does equal a mobile phone or a computer. The meaning shifts promiscuously, and that is a big problem.

Another issue is that technology is a new word. It was used in the 19th century but strictly as an “–ology”: the study of techne or the industrial arts. You had a Manchester College of Technology and a Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The master concept of modernity

Since the Second World War, the term has expanded to include the things that technology studies. Technology is things, but technology also refers to technique: how we use things (like piano playing technique).

We have a conceptual mess to start with. This is confounded even more because technology is not just a term of art; it is a master concept of modernity. It's one of those things like science, which is at the centre of what we consider to be the great transformations of the last 200 to 300 years. It’s a term freighted with an awful lot of meaning. We moralise about technology in a way we certainly wouldn't moralise about a piano or even a mobile phone. It matters what we think it is.

There's one other issue that we need to think about to answer the question: what is technology? There's an important element of time in many of our implicit definitions of technology. In practice, technology doesn't mean every human-made thing out there. It tends to mean new things – new things today and new things in the past. Technology is something at the beginning rather than the end of its life. However, it's not any old thing at the beginning of its life. Therefore, when we say that the mobile phone is the technology of the moment, or the digital is the technology of the moment, we have some sort of expectation that it will become even more important in the future.

Looking back, the technologies that we deemed to be important in the past are those originating in that historical period which we subsequently know or at least believe will become even more important in the future. There's a distorted sense of historical time, and time in general, when we use this word technology. It is messy definitionally, philosophically and historically, this master-concept of modernity. That explains why we find it difficult to think realistically and critically about this strange thing we call technology.

Coal is still king

Why does this strange concept of technology cause us difficulties? Because we impose on the world particular ideas of what is important and when.

Take, for example, the technology of coal mining. We think of technology in the period of the Industrial Revolution as involving coal. Thus, we certainly think of coal as a technology of the Industrial Revolution, or at least coal mining as such.

Still, if we were thinking of the period around 1900, and in particular about energy technologies, we wouldn't think about coal. We’d think about oil, perhaps, or we’d think about electricity. If we thought about energy technologies today, we would not be thinking about coal; instead, we'd be thinking about wind turbines, perhaps, or photovoltaic cells.

However, more coal is dug up and burnt today than ever in world history! Much more coal was dug up and burnt in 1900 than in 1800. Yet it disappears from our framing of the material world when we talk about technology. That's one key problem. Another is that we don't have a very good picture of the kinds of things that are being invented in any one historical period nor of what's novel in any historical period.

A selective narrative

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Novelties today are imagined to be in the digital arena. Novelties from around 1900 were supposed to be essentially chemical and electrical. Yet in 1900, there were many more kinds of novelties than electrical and chemical ones. Furthermore, today there are many more kinds of novelties than digital ones.

In other words, our understanding of the term technology does not capture the range of human-made artefacts that exist in the world at any particular time nor the innovations that have been made at any particular time. We have an extraordinarily selective understanding which we impose on the past and on the present. We think we know what the material world is made of. We think we know what the important ongoing inventions are. However, we don't. We are imposing crude ideas of the material of invention onto the world and then using our set ideas to make sweeping statements about the modern world’s nature.

Technologies never get old

A strange technological phenomenon is that technologies never get old. As soon as something ceases to be young and fresh and novel, it ceases to be a technology by definition. Yet we know that many kinds of machines and structures and techniques persist for a long time. We think of things becoming obsolete, but in fact, things rarely become obsolete. Our world is not one where a certain kind of material formation is entirely replaced by another. We don't have meteorite strikes that destroy all previous material forms in the way that all previous life forms were destroyed in the distant past. Instead, we have a process of accumulation. That's to say we have layer upon layer of technological history in our present.

I'm sitting here in London on some floorboards that were probably put into this house in the 1840s, which came by sailing ship, probably from the United States or Canada. The layout of the streets in this part of London dates from the 1840s and 50s. Nevertheless, here I am being filmed by a Sony camera, which is probably just a few years old and would have been unthinkable in the 1950s. Thus, we have layer upon layer of artefacts all interacting in the present. Are these floorboards obsolete? Are houses of this sort of shape obsolete? No, they are very much part of our everyday life here in London, just as the technological past is present worldwide.

Who are the inventors?

Who is behind our material world? Who makes things? Not everybody makes new things, but we all make some things. Therefore, perhaps the question is: who invents new technologies? The answer is that few people tend to invent new things. The invention of new things is not necessarily done by people; it's done by institutions. However, we do have particular models. The great lone inventor is still an important reference point in thinking about invention – the figure ahead of his (and it usually is his) time who comes up with an idea that the rest of the community rejects.

There's also an idea that technology’s novelties are not the products of power; they are revolutionary and involve a change in the status quo. Notwithstanding, it's more accurate to say that technologies enforce the status quo and that novelties are created by the powerful – by powerful companies, powerful individuals and powerful states – to reinforce their own power. Hence, the very question of who generates new technologies is one that's answered in obscure and unhelpful ways.

A more global, inclusive approach

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The problem with our story of technology isn't that it's Eurocentric, although it is. The fundamental problem is that we have a particular idea of what counts as an important technology in the world’s history.

We need to look at the whole world and ask: what is it that people use to make things? What are the sorts of things that people make? What kinds of techniques do they use? We will be surprised by what we find because it won’t correspond to our definitions of technology. We might want to invent new categories of technology: traditional technology or obsolete technology or technologies of this, that or the other. Still, all of this just points to the central problem: we have a concept of technology that doesn't correspond in any sort of straightforward way to the material constitution of our world.

Discover more about

the meaning of technology

Edgerton, D. E. H. (2019). Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900 (re-issue). Profile Books.

Schatzberg E. (2018). Critical History of a Concept. University of Chicago Press.

Edgerton, D. (2010). Innovation, Technology, or History: What is the Historiography of Technology About? Technology and Culture, 51(3), 680–697.