From Artifacts to Megamachines

What is technology?1 In the narrowest sense, technology consists of manufactured objects like tools
(axes, arrowheads, and their cutting-edge equivalents)

and containers (pots, water reservoirs, buildings). Their purpose is both to

enhance human competencies (e.g., with a hammer you can apply a stronger

force to an object) or to enable people to operate tasks they ought to not

perform otherwise (with a pot you can transport larger amounts of water;

with your fingers you cannot). Engineers call such objects “hardware”. Anthropologists communicate of
“artifacts”.

But science does now not give up there. Artifacts have to be produced. They

have to be invented, designed, and manufactured. This requires a larger

system inclusive of hardware (such as machinery or a manufacturing plant),

factor inputs (labor, energy, raw materials, capital), and subsequently “software”

(know-how, human knowledge and skills). The latter, for which the French

use the time period technique, represents the disembodied nature of technology, its

knowledge base. Thus, science includes both what things are made and

how things are made.

Finally, knowledge, or technique, is required not only for the production

of artifacts, however also for their use. Knowledge is needed to drive a automobile or use

a financial institution account. Knowledge is wanted each at the degree of the individual,

in complicated organizations, and at the stage of society. A typewriter, without

a user who knows how to type, let by myself how to read, is honestly a useless,

heavy piece of equipment.

Technological hardware varies in dimension and complexity, as does the “software” required to produce
and use hardware. The two are interrelated and

require both tangible and intangible settings in the shape of spatial structures and social organizations.
Institutions, such as governments, firms,

and markets, and social norms and attitudes, are especially important in

determining how systems for producing and using artifacts emerge and function. They determine how
unique artifacts and mixtures of artifacts
originate, which ones are rejected or which ones turn out to be successful, and, if

successful, how shortly they are integrated in the economy and the society.

The latter step is referred to as technological know-how diffusion.

For Lewis Mumford (1966:11) the upward thrust of civilization around 4000 B.C.

is not the result “of mechanical innovations, but of a radically new type of