Nye, Technology Matters 1-3

Can we define “technology?”

Does technology control us?

Is technology predictable?

Can we define “technology?”

Is technology a factor in evolution? (1)

In many cases…invention has been the mother of necessity (2)

[As travelers] we are all unfamiliar with some local technologies (6)

Humans have the ability to transform the environment and create a “second nature.” (8)

Technology is not applied science (10)

Sum total of systems of macines and techniques that underlie a civilization (or era): Eotechnic, Paleotechnic, Neotechnic… WHAT’S NEXT? (13)

Does technology control us?

Determinism and reductionism (17)

New technologies are shaped by social conditions (19)

American TV is secular, not religious; private, not public; funded by advertising, not taxation; and a purveyor of entertainment, not education. These are cultural choices (19)

The revenge of unintended consequences (21)

Marxism as“inevitable historical development?” (22)

Technology involves both social and mechanical inventions(26)

The machine cannot be divorced from its larger social pattern; for it is this pattern that gives it meaning and purpose. (Nye, 29, citing Mumford).

Is technology predictable?

Prediction

Invention, long term, not at all accurate

Forecasting

Innovation, engineers and entrepreneurs, decadal

Projection

Diffusion, designers and marketers, 3 years

Electricity, the telephone, radio, television, the computer, and the internet (perhaps intitially curiosities) are not implacable forces moving through history, but [are linked to] social processes that vary from one time period to another and from one culture to another (47)