What is technology?

Technology is the clothespin. Technology is a bicycle chain. Technology is the birth of a new industry which could not have been born without the metal fish book, or the polished glass mirror, or the transistor, or the liquid crystal display. Technology is applying a new solution to an old problem. Sometimes the new solution is so elegant that people cease to think about the old solution. Sometimes people cling to what they know, to what they have tested, to what has worked for them.

Technology is about change. It changes the way we work. It changes the way we communicate. It changes the way we think. Perhaps most importantly, it changes the way we change. Technology challenges us not only to change the way we do things, but to decide whether the way we do things is important to us. It begs us to consider our history, the way things were.

 It forces us to wonder what we lose when we gain.

Perhaps it is technology, or the changes associated with it, that make things seems more complicated: more choices, more subsets of choices,more information - always more information. We wonder about the best way to do something rather than how to do something.

(Sebastian Foti)