Ways of Understanding Technology

Ways of understanding what the word ‘technology’ means I’ve come across. Ordered from most common & practical to least, in my opinion.

Short

  1. Digital Artifacts
  2. The Computer Industry
  3. The Professional Activity of Engineers
  4. Outputs of Scientific Knowledge Applied for a Human Ends
  5. Extensions of the Human
  6. A Social Practice Understood as a Network of Influences
  7. A Materialization of Politics
  8. A Cultural Phenomenon
  9. A Knowledge-Generating Human Cognitive Activity
  10. A Way of Looking at the World
  11. A Self-Organizing, Accelerating Physical Process

Long

  1. Digital Artifacts. In everyday language the word ‘technology’ refers to digital artifacts: phones, software applications (e.g. TikTok, YouTube, X, Meta, Microsoft Office, Google Workspace), computers, tablets, gaming devices, smart watches, and IoT devices. This is what we commonly mean when we say that someone loves technology or that technology is harming our youth. See for example this clip from Joe Rogan on the “Effects of Technology on Developing Brains,” where the ‘technology’ in the conversation refers to popular digital devices and social media applications.

  2. The Computer Industry. The industry of hardware and software goods & services for consumer, enterprise, or government use. Includes the technology venture capital ecosystem and Silicon Valley in California.

New York Times Technology New York Times Technology section accessed on November 19, 2025

  1. The Professional Activity of Engineers. Technology is what engineers do when they go to work. It’s their professional activity. They are presented with a human end to meet (e.g. a customer’s request) and then design & construct things (artifacts, processes) to meet that end, using and generating scientific and other kinds of knowledge along the way.

  2. Outputs of Scientific Knowledge Applied for a Human Ends. Technology is what emerges when you apply scientific knowledge in order to realize a human desire or goal. In Silicon Valley, these desires or goals are often framed in terms of solving problems (e.g. the problem of housing, the problem of money, the problem of poverty). This is also called the instrumental view of technology and is the most traditional view of technology. Outputs can be artifacts (e.g. devices), processes (e.g. algorithms), or functional groups of artifacts (e.g. the Internet).

Google’s Definition of Technology Google query from San Francisco on November 14, 2025

  1. Extensions of the Human. Technologies extend humans out into the world. A hammer extends our arm, a telephone extends our voice, automation extends our body’s ability to perform tasks, and the internet extends our nervous system. This view is associated with Marshall McLuhan, a Canadian professor of English literature who wrote influential books in the 1960s.

  2. A Social Practice Understood as a Network of Influences. It’s too naive to consider that technologies arrive from an ideal, linear process in which engineers use a rational/scientific decision-making process to find an optimal solution to a problem for an external social agent. Instead, technologies are shaped in messy, circular ways through social interactions (e.g. negotiations, interpretations, struggles) between lots of different people and even non-human things. For example, technologies that have emerged as ‘stable’ have stabilized not because they are the optimal solution (i.e. design) for an abstract, intrinsic, clean-cut problem. Instead, they stabilize due to social negotiation: artifacts mean different things / solve different apparent problems for different social groups and they stabilize via a social process. This should not be surprising to anyone who has worked in technology business. In work from 1987 Pinch & Bijker argue this perspective with a classic example of the reasons for victory of the design of the safety bicycle, the most common bicycle design today. Actor-Network Theory (associated with Bruno Latour and his Science in Action from 1987) has been a dominant foundational framework for doing research on these processes since its development in the 1980s.

  3. A Materialization of Politics. Technological practices and artifacts are imbued with particular forms of the political (power, authority, social order). Langdon Winner argues in Do Artifacts Have Politics? (1980) that significant and apparently neutral artifacts have been constructed with the purpose of exercising political power on others (e.g. the example of Robert Moses’s low overpasses detailed in Robert Caro’s 1974 The Power Broker). More subtly, artifacts encode the political possibilities of the environment in which they were created (e.g. electrical grids or railroads arguably require centralized, hierarchical management). Andrew Feenberg argues in Democratic Rationalization: Technology, Power, and Freedom (1999) that artifacts are made from technical designs that deploy beliefs (i.e. that technical necessity dictates the path of development and that the pursuit of efficiency provides a basis for identifying that path) that are often explained away as necessary or rational, but may actually be false, and in fact may be used to justify restrictions for certain groups to participate in social institutions. Technology can support different kinds of societies oriented around different values, including ones more democratic than ours, and we have tools at our disposal to democratize technology.

  4. A Cultural Phenomenon. Technology sits between humans and the world in such a way that it affects how one relates to and makes sense of the other (e.g. eyeglasses cause an ‘embodiment’ relation, an MRI causes a ‘hermeneutic’ relation). Different cultures emphasize different ‘habits of perception’ which means that technology is a reflection of culture, or a way of revealing what is meaningful, knowable, or actionable. Once can also ask what culture the presence and use of technological devices create. The idea of technology as a mediator with different possible relations is associated with Don Ihde in his A Phenomenology of Technics (1990). McLuhan’s “the medium is the message” can also be understood along these lines. Albert Borgmann analyzed the worrisome effect of technical devices on culture and introduced his concept of a focal practice as a kind of antidote in Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life (1984).

  5. A Knowledge-Generating Human Cognitive Activity. Technology is a rational and cognitive activity that creates its own knowledge (technological, scientific, design) distinct from that of science. It is a way of knowing through making and a system of rational action. Mario Bunge and Walter Vincenti wrote influential books on the topic – the former in 1966 and the latter in 1990.

  6. A Way of Looking at the World. Technology is in essence not any artifact or any application of science, but a way of looking at the world that organizes it into resources that can be structured for retrieval and use. What was once a tree becomes lumber under the lens of technology. This is the influential view of Heidegger in The Question Concerning Technology from 1959, which influenced later thinkers who would attempt to understand technology from a cultural lens.

  7. A Self-Organizing, Accelerating Physical Process. Technology is a physical, autonomous, accelerating process that increasingly organizes matter. It is a manifestation of intelligence, which need not be human. Humanity is understood as a temporary site along the trajectory of the process. What we understand commonly as technology, especially computers, are human-made expressions of the process in action. Capitalism is also an expression of the process. Capitalism and technology are fundamentally intertwined. Associated with the writings of Nick Land, his collaborators at the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit at the University of Warwick in the 1990s, and the subsequent influence of his ideas.

Remarks

The case for the neutrality of technology seems hard. The basic view that technological artifacts are neutral tools that can be used for good and evil in equal measure and that humans are ultimately in control needs to address, at a minimum, the basic complications presented by views 6, 7, 8, 10, and 11.

Day-to-day use seems related to a measure of epistemic distance and familarity. We don’t usually speak of our hammer, car, or our washing machine as “technology” in the day-to-day, which suggests that there’s a criterion of recency or epistemic distance associated with the artifacts we do ascribe the label to. We understand how our hammer works and it’s an old tool – we don’t call it technology. Even though a standing desk is a recent tool, we more or less understand how it works – we don’t call it technology. Phones are harder to comprehend and have been around since the late 1800s – we call them technology. Personal computers are recent and hard to comprehend – we call them technology.

References

Articles & Books

  • Borgmann, Albert. (1984). Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life: A Philosophical Inquiry. University of Chicago Press.
  • Caro, Robert. (1974). The power broker: Robert Moses and the fall of New York. Alfred A. Knopf.
  • Feenberg, Andrew. (1999). Democratic Rationalization: Technology, Power, and Freedom. University of Minnesota Press.
  • Heidegger, Martin. (2008). The question concerning technology (W. Lovitt, Trans.). In D. F. Krell (Ed.), Basic writings: From Being and Time (1927) to The task of thinking (1964) (Revised and expanded ed., pp. 307–341). Harper Perennial. (Original lecture published 1954)
  • Ihde, Don. (1990). Technology and the Lifeworld. Indiana University Press.
  • Land, Nick. (2011). Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007. Edited by Ray Brassier and Robin Mackay. Urbanomic.
  • Land, Nick. (2017). A quick & dirty introduction to accelerationism. Jacobite Magazine.
  • Latour, Bruno. (1987). Science in action: How to follow scientists and engineers through society. Harvard University Press.
  • McLuhan, Marshall. (1964). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. McGraw-Hill.
  • Pinch, Trevor J., and Wiebe E. Bijker. (1987). “The Social Construction of Facts and Artifacts: Or How the Sociology of Science and the Sociology of Technology Might Benefit Each Other.” In The Social Shaping of Technology: How the Refrigerator Got Its Hum, edited by Donald MacKenzie and Judy Wajcman, 17-50. MIT Press.
  • Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (2022). “Philosophy of Technology.” Stanford Online Plato Entry Article. Retrieved from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/technology/.
  • Winner, Langdon. (1980). “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” Daedalus 109, no. 1: 121–136.
  • a16z (Andreessen Horowitz). (2023). The Techno-Optimist Manifesto. a16z.

Collections & Textbooks

  • Coeckelbergh, Mark. (2020). Introduction to Philosophy of Technology. Wiley.
  • Scharff, Robert C., and Val Dusek (Eds.). (2014). Philosophy of Technology: The Technological Condition: An Anthology. Wiley-Blackwell.
  • Sismondo, Sergio. (2021). An Introduction to Science and Technology Studies. 3rd ed. Wiley Blackwell.