Time and the Technium

I recently discovered that, in addition to his widely-read “Cool Tools” blog, former Wired executive editor and Long Now Foundation board member Kevin Kelly has a blog called “The Technium.” If you’ve never heard of it, go read a few entries. It’s everything I hope this blog could someday be.

In the inaugural post, “My Search for the Meaning of Tech,” Kelly introduces the idea of the Technium:

It’s a word I’ve reluctantly coined to designate the greater sphere of technology—one that goes beyond hardware to include culture, law, social institutions, and intellectual creations of all types.

We all have a habit of referring to only the leading edge of innovation as “technology”—in part, no doubt, because of the process of naturalization I described earlier. Things that count as “technology,” in our vernacular way of speaking, include computers, biotech, advanced manufacturing processes, space-aged alloys. Things that don’t count include bricks, novels, roads, languages.

In order to understand how technology and society evolve and transform each other, however, the concept must be freed from the contemporary moment. Technology is more than a handful of arbitrary categories that history has brought to momentary prominence. Once you drop the “cutting-edge” requirement, it becomes difficult to draw a line between artifacts that count as technology and those that don’t. Eventually, one must concede that technology includes all structures, concrete and abstract, which humans have created in order to bring about some imagined, desired end.

Viewed in this way, technology becomes inseparable from techne, one of Aristotle’s five categories of human knowledge. The study of technology becomes the study, not of artifacts or a disembodied historical force, but of human being and knowing.