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". . . the essence of technology is by no means anything technological."
-Martin Heidegger1
New Concepts as Historical Markers
The history of technology is one of those subjects that most people know more about than they realize. Long before the academy recognized it as a specialized field of scholarly inquiry, American schools were routinely disseminating a sketchy outline of that history tomillions of pupils.We learned about JamesWatt and the steamengine, EliWhitney and the cotton gin, and about other great inventors and their inventions. Even more important, we were led to assume that innovation in themechanic arts is a-perhaps the- driving force of human history. The theme was omnipresent in my childhood experience. I met it in the graphic charts and illustrations in my copy of The Book of Knowledge, a popular children's encyclopedia, and in the alluring dioramas of Early Man in the New York Museum of Natural History. These exhibits represented the advance of civilization as a sequence of the inventions in the mechanic arts with which Homo sapiens gained a unique power over nature. This comforting theme remains popular today and is insinuated by all kinds of historical narrative. Here, for example, is a passage from an anthropological study of apes and the origins of human violence:
Our own ancestors from this line [of woodland apes] began shaping stone tools and relying much more consistently on meat around 2 million years ago. They tamed fire perhaps 1.5 million years ago. They developed human language at some unknown later time, perhaps 150,000 years ago. They invented agriculture 10,000 years ago. They made gunpowder around 1,000 years ago, and motor vehicles a century ago.2
This typical summary of human history from stone age tools to Ford cars illustrates the shared "scientific" understanding, circa 2010, of the history of technology. But one arresting if scarcely noted aspect of the story is the belated emergence of the word used to name the very rubric-the kind of thing-that allegedly drives our history. The word is technology. The fact is that during all but the very last few seconds, as it were, of the ten millennia of recorded human history encapsulated in this account, the concept of technology-as we know it today-did not exist. The word technology, which...