After hearing from the experience of an older man, I decided to look at the opposite side of the spectrum, to examine the point of view of someone just entering the field of engineering. I decided that my roommate David, a freshman undecided engineer, would be a perfect candidate. I asked him to tell me the first things that came to his mind when I said “What is Technology?” His answer was this
“Well, it’s ummm, how people solve problems. [Its] what they make to solve problems. Do you agree? Technology changes rapidly, constantly, other than the dark ages there wasn’t any decline in technology. It helps us be more safe, it helps us in medicine, in warfare. It allows our society to advance above others. [For instance] you wouldn’t be able to write on that computer if it weren’t for technology. If we didn’t have technology, we would just be cavemen. We wouldn’t even carry around a stick ‘cus that could be technology, we couldn’t carry a club. We probably wouldn’t even have clothes.”
It seems to me that David is defining technology by what we would be without it: cavemen, with no weapons, no fire, and no wheel, not anything. I suppose that if you take his definition, technology is basically everything around us. In this case it isn’t natural food or drink, or a hole in a rock, but everything else is technology. This poses a problem though, because I am trying to narrow my definition of technology, or at least my understanding of it. If we look at technology as everything, it becomes much harder to define. Perhaps it is everything, but in its own time. If I go back to my definition and to the definition Mr. Powers gave me, technology is something evolutionary, something restricted to the present; created by, but not including the past. Perhaps David was wrong in his tenses, and technology was everything at some point, but is limited to the here and now.
“Well, it’s ummm, how people solve problems. [Its] what they make to solve problems. Do you agree? Technology changes rapidly, constantly, other than the dark ages there wasn’t any decline in technology. It helps us be more safe, it helps us in medicine, in warfare. It allows our society to advance above others. [For instance] you wouldn’t be able to write on that computer if it weren’t for technology. If we didn’t have technology, we would just be cavemen. We wouldn’t even carry around a stick ‘cus that could be technology, we couldn’t carry a club. We probably wouldn’t even have clothes.”
It seems to me that David is defining technology by what we would be without it: cavemen, with no weapons, no fire, and no wheel, not anything. I suppose that if you take his definition, technology is basically everything around us. In this case it isn’t natural food or drink, or a hole in a rock, but everything else is technology. This poses a problem though, because I am trying to narrow my definition of technology, or at least my understanding of it. If we look at technology as everything, it becomes much harder to define. Perhaps it is everything, but in its own time. If I go back to my definition and to the definition Mr. Powers gave me, technology is something evolutionary, something restricted to the present; created by, but not including the past. Perhaps David was wrong in his tenses, and technology was everything at some point, but is limited to the here and now.
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