Tess on some ideas that come up for her from the Potts and Murphie reading. Technology, society, culture, chicken or the egg? Arthur (who neatly notes that the author’s name’s could well be RMIT’s ‘private’ cafe) discusses the reading in relation to defining concepts of technology. That technology is not a tool, but a system is important (and so it is good to think about what a system is, and what that means). On the other hand we have culture, which today, is very hard to conceive of outside of a relation to technology (indeed someone like Jacques Ellul argues that culture is now a part of technology, not the other way round) – a proposition that first struck me as odd, and counter intuitive, until I thought about it and parked my cultural assumptions at the door. Georgina on the Watts reading does a similar move when she writes of technology that “[i]t’s oddly becoming a natural element of our world”. Yep, and it is odd to say that but really, how can we possibly think otherwise? What untechnologised moment have you had, anyone?