Technology: Driven by Uses, not Innovation
In an interesting article for The New Yorker, Steven Shapin reflects on the innovation hype, quoting a recently released book by David Egerton, The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900.
Above all, Edgerton says that we are wrong to associate technology solely with invention, and that we should think of it, rather, as evolving through use. A “history of technology-in-use,” he writes, yields “a radically different picture of technology, and indeed of invention and innovation.”
What seperates mankind from animals is the extensive use of tools. We define ourselves through technology. But it’s more the uses of technology that characterize a society - rather than the tools and gadgets, Shapin states. Lots of inventions did not have any affect on our way of life, though when we look back, we tend to look at a sequence of breakthrough innovations, thereby constructing a biased “technology-driven-history”.
