I've long thought that the best definition of "technology" is "a prosthetic." In this post I'm going to explain what I mean by that. I won't engage the boundaries between science, engineering and technology in this post, and I won't go into much detail about the model itself. My goal is to inflate the concept and compare it with what we know about technology.
I used to think I got this definition from McLuhan. But he mentions the specific equation once as far as I know and dances around prosthetics everywhere else. McLuhan is much less interested in what I'm going to call The Prosthetic Model than I hope every time I go back to him. This philosophical definition of technology, as just and only a prosthetic, matches my personal experience with technology. This is as a person who's profession was abstract technology-creation and -use, and an avid technology user, and as someone who's thought philosophically about technology and technology use his whole life.
Note that the meaning of "technology" shifts all the way through last sentence. When I say meaning, define the different meanings by pointing to the different kinds of activities involved in each use of "technology": the range of artefacts, routines, scopes and expectations associated with each occurrence of the word. That's part of the problem with the term technology. Technology is a fundamental human experience, and may be fundamental to life itself: To use something other than yourself for your own ends is the instrumental definition of life, and also what we do when we make and use technology. But we define "technology" so loosely, we clearly trust everyone will know pretty much exactly what we mean when we say it, using all the other parts of the world around the word to help us pick out the right meaning.
Meanings of "technology" cover the range of mediated human experience with the world. Telescopes and crutches are both technologies. Mathematics, religion, government, and arguably your local justice system are all technologies, on some interpretations of the word. When we find ourselves wondering at the boundary, which you might when I include religion as a technology, consider that for religion to be a technology we just need to admit that a religion's most reliable expectations are instrumental. That is, religion-as-technology should have at least a reliable expectation, e.g. "allow users to reliably extract wealth and control people." Whether religions do in fact offer eternal life and/or a reward here and there is another question. None of the adherents has yet come back to confirm, so we can't do much but wonder. In the meantime, religions-as-technology are reliably used by their adherents to extract wealth and control people. It's thus hard not to see religions as anything other than technologies for extracting wealth and controlling people, from a purely material expectation standpoint. They may be other things besides, but religions share many necessary features of other technogies.
Math is also a technology. As is your TV, and my cell phone. As are all commercial brands of relational database. The stone hammer is a technology, as is the clay tablet. As is the language written on the tablet. The tools used to make stone hammers and clay tablets and to write are also technologies. As you can see, the range stuffed into the general category "technology" is vast. A model to help corral and measure all of those definitions would be of immense help. So far that model has been missing in technology studies. Thus my enthusiasm for the Prosthetic model.
One modern conception of "technology" calls any business process that is at least newly-partly-automated by software developers using computers and the associated artefacts, Tech. The experience behind this conception is something like:
- Software developers type some sentences that instruct a series of computers to follow a set of rules to produce a given set of outcomes given a set of inputs
- The newly-partly automated process at least allows fewer humans to create the process's output than before
In a modern Tech transformation a range of prosthetics are required to make the newly-partly-automated process work. The new process is more effective, hopefully, which is our gain of function: more widgets off the assembly line, easier decisions, etc. But the use of the process requires specialized skills, and its maintenance even more rarefied skills, so we have a restriction in range of motion. The "new technology" sure seems to function like a prosthetic.
Any new artefacts, concrete or abstract as they may be, are also called new technologies. This definition might cover iPhones, Airflow, gene splicing, building construction improvements (because they use a computer to help automate some tasks), social media, media distribution, or even computer-aided decision making of really any sort up to and including planet-killer AIs, in any industry or sphere of human behavior.
New technologies also include better hammers, better drills, better kinds of exlosives and faster airplanes, too. A new kind of bridge might be a "new technology" in that it solves the old problem of bridging chasms in a brand new way.
But when we think through this idea that "technologies are just prosthetics" we see that some of the puzzling negative features of "technology" are actually right there obviously in prosthetics.
Consider overuse injuries, which occur with every prosthetic. You see overuse injuries with artificial limbs, the classic prosthetic, obviously. But also with social media on any screen, phones specifically. You see these injuries in the overuse of purely absract technologies like math, where we'd say we "overrelied on the math" to solve problems like poverty or quantitative trading. The word "technology" is a mass noun, so it can be difficult to distinguish individual effects. So let's walk through a quick example.
One kind of overuse injury from technology is caused by the kinetic physical manipulation of the particular devices associated with the technology. Are you hunched over a laptop on a TV tray, a dashboard in a car, or a phone on the subway? Any of those cramped postures, required to consume the information provided by the technologies that make up the laptop, truck or phone, will cause an overuse or ergonomic injury.
An example of an overuse injury caused by the cluster of technologies we label "social media" is the chronic negative self-esteem that every user who isn't a sociopath flirts with. Necessarily, because social media is gamefied, users compare with others and ask why they are better liked. Many component technologies in the social media cluster are oriented to enhance envy between users. Overuse of social media will inevitably cause users to aggregate the negative consequences of envious comparisons, sometimes at scale. We already see specific traumas from teenage social media users in therapist offices. Eventually there will need to be some publicly-funded compensation for people who's overuse injuries for social media aren't as apparent as their friends with carpal tunnel syndome and myopia.
Not every user of any given instance of any given prosthetic will develop the same overuse injuries. This is an important point about prosthetics. There's a list of consequences. Not everyone suffers equally.
Pick some sort of human behavior that has an overuse injury associated with it and the likelihood is that behavior uses a prosthetic - a technology - of some sort. This is an important and clarifying observation: Where there's a primate with overuse injuries, there's a primate using technologies.
This overlap between "what goes wrong with technologies?" and "what goes wrong with prosthetics?" and similar questions is enough to make me think that the appropriate model for understanding how primates like us use technology is that all technologies are just examples of the prosthetic. For the ape things that we are, that got chased out of the forest onto the plains where we lost our hair and learned to run in packs, all technologies are just prosthetic. Other animals may experience technologies differently, perhaps partly as prosthetic and partly as something else or even not as a prosthetic at all. For primates like us, technology is just a prosthetic.
This is a wide definition I'm claiming however. Any technology, because it is a prosthetic, is intended to provide a gain of function at the cost of a range of motion. The gain of function must be material: A benefit, identifiable. The gain of function of the prosthetic may operate on concrete objects, such as "the distance from the car in the parking lot to the grocery store" that we traverse with the wheelchair. Or the prosthetic may offer a gain of function on abstract objects: Influence with the key 25-40yo single professional demographic. Categories, Numbers, Sets, Groups, Fourier Transforms and Mandelbrot Sets. The likelihood someone will default on a car loan. An orchestration tool that will turn on data pipelines from an on-premise database to blob storage and then into a logical data warehouse. The mathematical proofs needed to get to the Moon and back. These are all examples of a "modern technology" offering us a gain of function, some quite practical and some quite fanciful.
That's how we experience a new technology: As a new prosthetic. We're promised a gain of function but we can only use it in a narrow range of circumstances. At first we don't know how to use the technology; sometimes we use the artefacts in weird ways because we don't know the intended use as a prosthetic. Then we develop a habit around the use as prosthetic, the intended use, integrated fluidly into a routine. We learn how to use the things, and then we integrate the things into our life and the technology becomes a part of our routine. We develop habits around putting the prosthetic on, on using it to manipulate the world, interpreting the limited feedback it sends us about what we use it for. We analyze our gain of function(s) and check whether they match our expectations. We may get a better phone, wheelchair, truck, machine learning model or theory of Sets as a result. But we have an expected gain of function from the technology.
In my next post I'll walk through the Prosthetic model of technology in more detail. We need some logic.
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