Technology

"The application of Scientific knowledge for practical purposes, especially in industry; machinery and devices developed from scientific knowledge"(OED)

"The use of science in industry, engineering, etc., to invent useful things or to solve problems" (MW)

-Examples of Technology: iPad, E-book

-Using science and innovation to create things and develop processes to solve problems in a practical way

Definition: Studies of technology explore the creation and use of technical means and their interrelation with life, society, and the environment

Provides themselves with material and structural objects of civilization

Writing as Technology

-writing restructures thought = technology affects, and is affected by, social and psychological components of human life

-changed some fundamental elements of what it means to be human

Oral Culture (Pre - writing, pre - literacy)

-repeat and repeat the truths that have come down from the ancestors. Otherwise these truths will escape

The Shift To Literacy

-Writing as a second-order function

-Naturally and must be taught

-Writing is artificial

Critiques of Writing as Technology

-Writing as unnatural, foreign, divisive, etc. (Plato)

Technological Development (Global?)

-Our understandings of what it means to be human are increasingly mediated by technical decisions and technological access

Technology and Sound

-Definition of Sound

1."A particular auditory impression, tone;

2.The sensation produced in the organs of hearing" (MW)

Sound can operate as a truth claim

-making sense of the world and to locate ourselves

-context - dependent

Soundscape

-Sound is ever - present, though we rarely consider it

-The many sounds that are with us at all times, even when our attention is not focused on them.

-The soundscapes is and ever-shifting cacophony of quiet noise.