The Potts & Murphie reading (whose names remind me of RMIT’s campus cafe), take on the influences of technology on our culture and its transformative evolution through the 17th to the 19th century.
Firstly, the authors reference the term technology‘s origins from the Ancient Greek, as the system of art. In the 17th century, the meaning behind the word is extracted from exactly this, until its shift to a modern usage in the 19th century. Occurring in the rise of science, technology became the system of mechanical and industrial arts, the foundation of a new world whose growing future is dependent on its mechanical inventions. Therefore, the term technique is subjected as the way we use such technology. The technological concept is labelled as a “vast pile of junk”, without the knowledge of the how and why we use them. “Losing” our techniques or awareness of operational skill means corresponds with its uselessness.
Culture, on the other hand, requires more effort in understanding. Whereas it is possible to contain culture as its self-contained element within arts and/or entertainment, i.e. French culture and youth culture, it simplifies the potential for culture to embrace all human activity. The early 19th century recognised culture as the artistic and intellectual aspects to a civilisation, Romantics claiming industrial mechanisation as inhumane. In the 20th century, however, with the foundation of our dependency on computer technology, we witness a convergence of civilisation’s “techno-culture”.
Ultimately, the technology we use today is reliant on a co-dependency between how we use them (technique) and the benefits they provide for us. But if the human mind is correlated to the abilities of the advanced computer, does that make our bodies technologies themselves? Then the computer technology we are dependent upon would possess its own techniques that provides purpose to our modern existence. The challenge on the definition of technology once again arises, in this case…techno-culture beginning even further back in history than we imagine. The artistic and intellectual aspects of civilisation is then to be considered, the offspring of the technology of our own bodies, with which civilisation is built upon.
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