Meaning
in TechnologyNavigating the site:
Arnold Pacey
What is the importance of the settings we alter by tool use?
Chapters: 5. The Sense of Place
II. Contexts of Technology: Nature,
People, and Conflict:
The situation and circumstances of Tools: Conflict, Gender, and Nature:
thesis | relationship | politics | nature | conclusion
Related Chapters in Part II:
Exploration, Invention and the Remaking of Nature.
Gender and Creativity
Knowledge Pregnant with Evil
1) nature, the physical, chemical, & biological intersection
A. Hobbes “war of all against all”
B. Rousseau’s and Locke’s “state of nature”
2) second nature, Plato’s belief that nature
is incomplete
A. humans complete the –as yet unformed—reality
B. Emerson: soul and Oversoul conjoin in humans
.
Twin impulses in natural responses of humans to places:
1. pleasure and excitement in making things
2. impulses to improve the human condition
Two ways to assess the value of nature:
A. the intimate dialogue of Michael Farraday
B. Cost benefit analysis – arms distance approach
We find our personal, social and ethnic identities in whole or in part in relation to places, either sublime or decreated places that have emotive pull or psychic draw for us.
Cecil Rhodes monument in the Matopo Hills, Zimbabwe.
“The site illustrates two kinds of meaning
1. The sense of nature
2. The feeling of invitation
story of the Chinese monkey at the edge of the universe, marking his territory
by urinating on the five boundary columns that marked that boundary.
Sangre de Cristo range of SW USA: Taos, New Mexico “took refuge.” Anasazi, or Puebla [not Navajo country]
“Journada de los muetos”
“The irony is that...this place of escape became the setting for the most ambitious effort hitherto for wresting nature’s ultimate forces from her control,...”
Los Alamos, White Sands and the atomic bomb burst of July 18, 1945
103
Many more people feel far more threatened by the prospect of environmental
catastrophe (DeLillo), and....this threat may be considerably more serious
than most commentators admit.”
104
“It is in those world’s we are now expected to locate our sense
of place.”
“The new lifestyle provides many opportunities for making money on
a grand scale, and much of that money translates into power over the shape
of the electronic worlds now coming into being.”
122
“de-creation” Hamilton-Paterson “discusses it with immense
feelings of loss.”
“the digital revolution,...demands that we should ‘move indoors
to renounce the external world,’ because technology is now seen as
the new nature’ with virtual realit (VR) regarded as more exciting,
more real even, than what is dismissively denoted as RL (for real life).”
122
Politics
“I believe that political analysis, which is absolutely essential,
needs to be complemented by an understanding of how individuals experience
the environment.”
104
“how they experience landscape”
or “how they feel about marking the landscape,...by constructing
dams, and irrigation systems, or bridges and highways.”
105
“it has become clear that all this wonderfully transcendent purposiveness
is often out of step with social purposes that need to be addressed.”
106
“paradox of what is valuable in science and technology, and what
seems to betray its social meaning”
Public is ambivalent about technology:
virtuosity and discovery are respected but there is skepticism over alleged
social benefits
Intimacy with nature vs. alienation from nature:
Barbara McClintock, Edward O. Wilson vs.
A. Part of
Humans are intimate agents in nature affecting the outcome of the game
B. Apart from
Humans stand aside, apart from the world they describe and plan to mark
Seeing Nature as a common interdependent experience
1. nature is a genetic crap shoot
2. nature is complex relations among responsive, resilient and replenishing features
3. is a losing situation for human endeavors due to inverse relation of benefits to shared costs, inevitability of commons:+ 10 benefit versus - .1 cost
Cost benefit analysis removes us from the immediacy of nature – yet,
all the same-- we still participate in nature, not as bystanders but as
affective ingredients in a game
.
Arena the bounded setting in which a game is played for a limited time.
Conclusion
- Feedback is an essential characteristic of all animals responses to their surroundings. Feedback is a dynamic relationship in that a respsponse can either reinforce (positive feedback) or counter (negative feedback) the stimulus any creature receives from its native milieu or ambient conditions.
- Technology is an active intrument or practice used to modify the positive or negative feedback responses humans have with respect to their surroundings.
- Technology has its own dynamic qualities partially derived from nature and partially dictated by how its parts function to both modify the user and the conditions in which tools are used to solve problems.
Tools of Toil: what to read. Tools are historical building blocks of technology.
