What Does Technology Even Mean?

As the Buddy Holly song goes, “Everyday it’s a gettin’ closer, / Goin’ faster than a roller coaster.” I take him to have been talking about the breakneck pace at which technology has developed. We use it every single day; we talk about it “progressing,” and bringing us “closer” to something, but yet: do we even know what it is?

Well, from someone with extremely inadequate Greek, here are your roots: techne (art, skill, etc.) and logia (I speak, almost Jesus, etc.) The argument often goes that we’ve had technology for as long as anyone can remember. Apes use tools, someone invented eyeglasses, and Homer Simpson has a driver’s license. But I respectfully disagree. Technology, etymologically-speaking, is pretty new.

Sure, we’ve always invented things, but the purpose has become more radical: it is the marriage of knowing and making; it is the domination of nature through man’s reasoned creation of objects. Take for example a quote from Francis Bacon: “Victoria cursus artis super naturam,” “The triumph of art over nature” This father of modern science writes about art’s triumph over nature. This is technology.

How? Well, prior to Bacon’s time, the Western tradition saw the cosmos, or the world, as an ordered whole in which man participated. There was a hierarchy of goods, according to which man could orient himself and thus attain his proper role within the created world. Modern science, preceded by what we medievalists like to call the Nominalist Revolution, shattered this image. Nature is not an ordered whole, but a disordered world, which man experiments on in order to understand it. There is no telos for man in this system’s nature.
It’s no coincidence that technology arose around the same time. It is the expression of this new science; it is molding and changing of disordered nature by orderly mankind. By creating technology, nature could be ordered and redefined according to our whims in a way never before imagined.

This is why Heidegger’s conception of “technology as ontology” is important. Technology has changed our mode of being. We are more easily distracted, and increasingly egocentric. But we are also more materially comfortable and healthier than we’ve ever been. Yet we can’t ignore the trade-offs we’ve made. Technology cannot be seen as benign. It is changing us, but it’s up to us to evaluate what it is we’ve lost and whether what we’ve gained is worth it.