Technology

Technology’ is one among the keywords of our world, yet it's also one among the foremost confused. As an analytical category, it seems necessary for our understanding of all of humanity’s history. We are probably comfortable with asserting that humans have had technologies since the Palaeolithic, and a menagerie of animals, from crows to chimps, have even been identified as tool users. As an actors’ category, ‘technology’ is of surprisingly recent vintage, although cognate terms – techne, arts, then on – have a way longer history. Yet even for a recent English word ‘technology’ has come to embrace often conflicting meanings. during this essay review, I even have three aims. First, I will be able to offer a summary of Eric Schatzberg’s important new opus Technology, which untangles and clarifies the history of ‘technology’ and its cognates as actors’ categories. Second, I will be able to conduct a critical appraisal, arguing that Schatzberg, while helpfully placing past ways of brooding about technology into two camps, once he calls the ‘cultural’ and ‘instrumental’ approaches, makes a misstep when he favors the previous over the latter. Third, I offer an extension of my preferred instrumentalist definition, one which highlights an important property of technologies – their power to intervene over scales – in a way that, I suggest, offers a replacement, the invigorating direction of study for historians of science and technology.