It's a bit difficult to unpack your question because so many different and divergent concepts and aspects are lumped into this word #technology. Its primary image, that of a #tool, is contrasted with the results of its application, and stuff (material or immaterial) that serves a #purpose. Also layers of generality: of practical knowledge; generalised procedures to effect impacts; strata of consequences that in themselves have such consequential "power" that people have only few ways to influence and change courses of events.
Thus to me two things turned out to be important over the years:
° thinking about technology via the image of "tools" is devastaingly inappropriate
° thinking about technology deflects from the perhaps more important topic of #infrastructure
To me, the history of infrastructure(s) began to replace questions about technology or its history.
With "infrastructure" I don't mean merely places, built environments, supply chains and innovations therein (e.g., the innovation of the shipping container in the 1930s and its standarisation in the 1960s which proved decisive in the Vietnam war). It entails concepts of #energy density, of market economies, of sustainibility...
But more to your point: I find the most fitting metaphor for technology to be that of a #game. Be it competitve games, be it solitary games, be it "new games". The aspect of playfullness is more important than earlier generations of tech critique may have acknowledged.
Finally , Langdon Winner taught me about "regimes." The greater part of technology is not visible. An automobile is the result of a complex global supply chain, from mines to microchips, and its use of petroleum is changing the climate.
So...what other concepts/metaphors have proved to be useful to you for thinking about #technology
we turn stones into axes and came to see the world as a "standing reserve" for our exploitation.
Jacques Ellul wrote presciently and somewhat depressingly about the future of technology back in the 1950s. In English, his masterwork is "The Technological Society." In the original French, it's "La Technique." Technique, or any method for achieving ends with increasing efficiency, is the foundation -- like standing reserve, it's a way of seeing the world. Technology grows from it. (more)
Off the top of my head, four different concepts/metaphors have proved to be useful.
Lewis Mumford's "megamachine" -- the notion that the ur-technology that drove its evolution was the way rulers and their muscle allied with priests to build pyramids and irrigation projects by treating people as components in a hierarchical machine with overseers at every level.
Heidegger is mostly impenetrable to me, but I latched onto his notion of a "standing reserve." Humans make use of the world, (...more)
I'm interested in critical conversations about #technology. I'm a technology enthusiast. I'm grateful for chemotherapy and html and enthusiastic about #onlinecommunities -- but also have always tried to think about how and why our tool use can change us and our environment in undesirable ways. A thread: