I’ve had bad eyesight since I was very young and every morning when I wake up the first thing I do is look for my glasses in my pocket. Without glasses I see everything blurry, but so I put them on my face and adjust them over my nose suddenly my abilities expand and I am able to read, write, drive and do my job. The glasses are a technical breakthrough, a watermark that combines knowledge of physics and engineering to improve my abilities and solve a problem I have. In other words, glasses are technology, but for some strange reason no one talks about them in those terms. We’ve all heard someone explain that they need to get new glasses, but we’ve never heard anyone say they need to upgrade the technology that allows them to see well.
Technology is a word of Greek origin made up of téchn?, which means skill in a technique, art or craft, and logia, which refers to the science of something. Agriculture is technology, as are glasses, television, printing or a clock, but no one says that they will use technology to know what time it is or that they will go to a technology center to make some photocopies. So, despite the fact that everything is technology, there must be some criterion that intuitively leads us to use this term in some cases but not in others.
It is easy. We use the term technology when what we are talking about is after our birth. Or to put it another way, if we call it technology it means that we are still trying to understand, assimilate and incorporate it, and as we get there we will stop calling it technology and normalize not only its uses but also the language. We haven’t said technology when talking about glasses for centuries. For my grandfather, TV was technology and for me it is no longer. We talk about technology to refer to computers, but for our son this is no longer technology, as for me a calculator is not technology either. Every time you refer to something using the word technology, you are implying that it is new to you and that you are still in the adoption phase. And if instead of technology you say new technologies directly, it means that you don’t understand it.
We are in transition from an industrial society to a digital society and we still don’t quite know where we will end up and what the resulting model will look like. We know, for sure, that it is a change that affects our social, cultural and economic schemes, our ways of learning, working, playing and relating. That maybe power will no longer be organized around work but around information, that maybe the political and representative systems will have to change, and that maybe we will have to discuss our rights and duties. But the fact that our political, social and economic leaders continue to constantly talk about technology means that they are still trying to figure out what the new tools are now at our disposal, and that therefore they can hardly lead the traffic towards the digital society.
Every society, and almost every generation, experiences the arrival of different technologies and each of these technologies goes through different phases of adoption before it is not reasonably incorporated. If you have doubts, language is a good clue to identify which moment of adoption we are in. No one talks about technology anymore to refer to the heating thermostat or the ceramic glass, but we do still use the term technology to talk about the driving assistance systems that new cars have. If you call it technology, it means that you consider it a novelty, but be careful because there are people around you who may be disturbed if they sense that for you it is still surprisingly new. Arthur C. Clarke, the author of 2001, an odyssey in space, already said it: “All sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” If you use the word technology too much, you might still find it all a bit magical deep down, and that makes us suspicious of whether you really understand what we’re dealing with and whether you’re ready to handle it.
Technology is very relevant and having it or not having it can mean gaining or losing competitiveness, doing things better or worse, going well or going bad, but what is really important is to understand it, to know what it is for you want, in what way, at what time and to do what. Pay attention: when all this is already clear and mature we no longer call it technology. Run away from technology and fall in love with solutions.
