Technology and Society
Notes

What is technology?

Structure of knowledge, know-how and physical implements that provide capabilities for affecting the natural and social world.

Knowledge
Innovation

Big Technologies (General Purpose Technologies)

Technology	Date of Invention	Type/Impact
Stone Tools Language Domestication of Plants Domestication of Animals Smelting of ore Wheel Writing Bronze Iron Waterwheel Three-masted sailing ship Printing Scientific knowledge Steam engine Factory system Railroads Telegraph Iron steamship Medical science Internal combustion engine Electricity Motor vehicle Airplane Mass production Lean production Computer Internet Biotechnology Nanotechnology	1,000,000 BCE 50,000 - 100,000 BCE 9,000 - 8,000 BCE 8,500 - 7,500 BCE 8,000 - 7,000 BCE 4,000 - 3,000 BCE 3,400 - 3,200 BCE 2,800 BCE 1,200 BCE 800 CE 15th century 15th century 16th - 17th century Late 18th century Late 18th century 19th century 19th century 19th century 19th century Late 19th century Late 19th century 20th century (early) 20th century (early) 20th century (early) 20th century (mid) 20th century (1950-1975) 20th century (1969-1990) 20th century (1990 - ?) 21st century (early)	Materials Technology Information/Communication Materials Technology Power, Transportation Power Tool Information/Communication Materials Technology Materials Technology Power Transportation Information/Communication Information Power Organization of production Transportation Information/communication Transportation Quality of life Transportation, power Power Transportation Transportation Organization of production Organization of production Information/Communication Information/Communication Change human evolution Materials technology

How does technology affect society?

Technology helps to define values and goals, primarily by turning abstract possibilities into real options.

But technology is not a force, like gravity, that exerts its effects independently of human action. Rather, it must be understood as a set of capabilities that enable new forms of activity and thereby alters the range of human institutions.

Technological change often cascades through human institutions, producing changes at great distance in time.

The power of technology in restructuring social relationships and redefining values comes primarily from its impact on the material aspects of life and the consequent effects on other realms of human activity. Each of the great technologies of the past had some combination of four qualities:

first, the technology dramatically expanded what we could do in areas that mattered;
second, this was accomplished in a very cost-effective manner, and usually at a declining cost over time;
third, the technology had extensive externalities and spillovers affecting wide areas of human life; and
fourth, the application of the technology fed on the effects of the first three to generate positive feedbacks or increasing returns.

Technology operates to create new resources that affect how society works (think of calories and cotton) and technology often affects the distributon and redistribution of resources. Technology frequently affects the relative power of groups and can lead to considerable conflict (airplanes). Technology can also have effects that were not desired or anticipated (nuclear weapons).

When the cost of doing something important falls exponentially, while the capabilities for accomplishing it rise exponentially, material relationships are rapidly and radically restructured.

Printing Press

The printing press changed the conditions under which information was collected, stored, retrieved, criticized, discovered, and promoted. She recognizes explicitly that change is multi-causal, but argues that-- as an agent--printing had important causative effects on the Reformation, the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution.

Print did more than spread the Protestant Reformation: in an important sense, print caused the Reformation.
Without access to the printed editions of biblical texts and church fathers, and the worrisome variants on crucial dogmatic issues they contain, Luther might never have been stimulated to develop his revolutionary new theology.

Eisenstein points out that the Italian renaissance differed little from earlier ones until the printing press “fixed” it and helped spread it north of the Alps. “Typographical fixity” refers to the preservative power of print. Ideas recorded in
only a few manuscripts were alway s in danger of being forgotten or lost by the intellectual community. Put those same ideas in hundreds of identical printed copies, and they were much more likely to spread and endure.

In science, the notion of cumulative and progressive knowledge was absolutely revolutionary. “Scientific data collection was born with printing” and new contributions became part of a “permanent accumulation no longer subject to the cycle of rapid decay and loss.” Copernicus compared the ideas and data of Ptolemy, Aristotle and others; noted their errors and inconsistencies; and published “De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium” in 1543--starting the Scientific Revolution.

Systematic, organized and disciplined knowledge was enhanced by the printing of books.

How did the printing press change the cost of doing things that mattered?

What externalities or spillovers did the printing press lead to?

Positive feedback or increasing returns?

Knowledge

Increasing Returns
Positive feedback
Virtuous Cycles

Resistance to new techology

Scribes and writing

Scribes amd printing press

Conservative Christians and stem cell research

Liberal arts professors and computers

Catholic Church and modern science - Galileo and Copernicus