Assignment #5

In today’s society, there are many technologies that control our world, and it would be difficult to think of our lives without them. Common day chores would become more complex and people would have to work harder to get a task done. However, technologies have been around for centuries. In “Technology Matters”, David Nye states “It is easy to imagine human beings as pre-literate, but it is different to imagine than as pre-technological.” (p. 5) Technologies may have always been around, but maybe they are becoming something new.
These days, technologies have become more of a necessity than a luxury for many people who take it for granted. Centuries ago there wasn’t a little portable television screen you could put in your car to tell you how to get places. You would have to map out your destination before you left to go somewhere. Have we all just become lazy? We have PDA’s that handle our busy week schedules, iPods that hold all of our music, and email that only requires the click of a button to send. All of these technologies have taken time and work away from us. These technologies have also given us some things as well. They have given us the power to be more productive and educated. We are now able to have mass productions creating thousands of things easily instead of making them by hand one by one. New technologies also create a social atmosphere at work places. If we have all these new technologies, we need workers who are educated enough to understand the aspects of them. This is where humans come into the concept of technology. According to Nye “Work is a social practice, requiring coordination between people, and a workplace contains an ensamble of tasks that must be orchestrated.” (p.110). These workplaces act as social places as well because practitioners can learn from others. In the book “Meaning in technology” Arnold Pacey states “Evidently, then, the social meaning of technology coexists and interact with the personal responses and “existential” experience of individuals.” (p.78)
We all want what we can’t have, and we all do have these technologies that run our lives. Nye states “Technologies are not foreign to “human nature” but inseparable from it.”(p.) If you didn’t strive for the next new big thing, or want something better than what you’ve got then you aren’t human. We are all human and it is within our genes to always strive for something better. In the book “Existential Technics” by Don Ihde he states “It is a hunting and gathering society whose form of praxis is one which gains its living from hunting animals and gathering plants and their products, but it is not primarily a sedentary society which practices agriculture or animal domestication.” (p. 15) Here Ihde is comparing the needs and wants of a new technology to our hunting and gathering nature, always trying to get the next best thing.
When we think of technologies many of them do help a lot and some might be lost without them. They bring both good and bad along with them and never fail to produce something bigger and better. They allow us to grow faster and let us do things that we would otherwise struggle with. In the end I think we definitely would not be where we are today without the technologies we have.