âTechnologyâ is one of those words where your bullshit detectors should perk up whenever you hear it.
âTechnologyâ is one of those words where your bullshit detectors should perk up whenever you hear it.
Itâs so broad but is often used to talk about something really specific (mobile internet, or social media, or W3C standards, or a particular small group of struggling small businesses in southern california, or taxi services, or labor law evasion), so itâs used to apply generalizations to large groups of things that have nothing in common except accidents of history.
I have never heard the word âtechnologyâ used in a meaningful way outside of social anthropology.
So, if somebody says something about âtechnologyâ that isnât applicable to hand-axes, ask yourself: what did that person actually intend to talk about, and what unrelated things could easily be confused for it that the statement would be false for?
(For instance, âtechnology kills social skillsâ is probably intended to mean social media but not labor law evasion or tax services.)
Very often, when somebody uses a broad word like that unthinkingly, what theyâre saying isnât actually meaningfully true in any possible specific reading! They said it that way because they havenât actually thought clearly about it.
(For instance, âtechnology kills social skillsâ can only be interpreted as true in very limited way: i.e., different means of communication produce different norms of behavior, and behavioral norms irrelevant to someoneâs life are forgotten or never learned.)
By John Ohno on May 11, 2018.
Exported from Medium on September 18, 2020.