Standard View of Technology

Necessity is the mother of invention. As Man has been faced with severe survival challenges, certain extraordinary individuals have seen, often in a brilliant flash of inspiration, how to address the challenge of Need by applying the forces, potentialities, and affordances of Nature to the fabrication of tools and material artifacts. The power of Nature is there, waiting to be harnessed, to the extent that the inventor can clear away the cobwebs of culture to see the world from a purely utilitarian standpoint. In this we see Man's thirst for Progress.

Form follows function. To be sure, Man decorates his tools and artifacts, but artifacts are adopted to the extent that their form shows a clear and rational relationship to the artifact's intended function --that is, its ability to satisfy the need that was the raison d'etre of the artifact's creation. Thus, a society's material culture becomes a physical record of its characteristic survival adaptation; material culture is the primary means by which society effects its reproduction. The meaning of human artifacts is a surface matter of style, of surface burnish or minor symbolization.

By viewing the material record of Man's technological achievements, one can directly perceive the challenges Man faced in the past, and how he met these challenges. This record shows a unilinear progression over time, because technology is cumulative. Each new level of penetration into Nature's secrets builds on the previous one, producing ever more powerful inventions. The digging stick had to precede the plow. Those inventions that significantly increase Man's reach bring about revolutionary changes in social organization and subsistence. Accordingly, the ages of man can be expressed in terms of technological stages, such as the Stone Age, the Iron Age, the Bronze Age, and so on. Our age is the Information Age, brought on by the invention of the computer. Overall, the movement is from very simple tools to very complex machines. It was also a movement from primitive sensorimotor skills (techniques) to highly elaborate systems of objective, linguistically coded knoledge about Nature and its potential (technology).

Now, we live in a material world. The result of the explosion of technological knowledge has been a massive expansion of Man's reach, but with lamentable and unavoidable social, environmental, and cultural consequences: We live in a fabricated environment, mediated by machines. Technology was more authentic when we used tools, because we could control them. Machines, in contrast, control us. Thus one can identify a Great Divide or Rupture when Man lost his authenticity as a cultural creature, his Faustian depth as a being living in a world of cultural meaning, and gave himself over to a world ruled by instrumentalism and superficiality. This Rupture was the Industrial revolution, which launched the Age of the Machine. As the primacy of function over aesthetics rips through culture, we increasingly live in a homogeneous world of functionally driven design coherence. Our culture has become an inauthentic one in which reified images of techology predominate. We define ourselves only by purchasing plastic, ersatz artifacts made far away. To retain some measure of authenticity the young must be brought into direct contact with the great works of art and literature.

Pfaffenberger, published in the 1992 Annual Review of Anthropology.