According to the World English Dictionary, technology is:
| 1. | the total knowledge and skills available to any human society for industry, art, science, etc |
According to the World English Dictionary, culture is:
| 1. | the total of the inherited ideas, beliefs, values, and knowledge, which constitute the shared bases of social action |
| 2. | the total range of activities and ideas of a group of people with shared traditions, which are transmitted and reinforced by members of the group: the Mayan culture |
| 3. | a particular civilization at a particular period |
| 4. | the artistic and social pursuits, expression, and tastes valued by a society or class, as in the arts, manners, dress, etc |
| 6. | the attitudes, feelings, values, and behavior that characterize and inform society as a whole or any social group within it: |
Both technology and culture are difficult words to describe as they are very broad. In my time as a 6th grade social studies teacher, I was challenged each year to help students learn and understand what these two terms meant. The above definitions, while accurate, are certainly not going to be well understood by your average 11-12 year old. I started by defining culture in very broad terms, the way of life for a group of people. I then broke it out in over a dozen parts such as: food, recreation, shelter, economy, government, rituals, religion, etc. Technology was one of those parts. We then defined technology as having two interconnected but different strands. First there was the simple to identify tools that the society used. The second was the knowledge and understanding they had which allowed them to take as step forward from the groups before them. For example, two important technological developments were necessary to move beyond hunting and gathering to an agricultural lifestyle. The easy part was learning how to adapt from using wood, bone, and stone to make weapons to make articles such as shovels, plows, and baskets. The hard part was the discovering that planted seeds would grow. The point I’m trying to demonstrate is the technology is not just the updating of the tools we have, but it is often accompanied, or even led, by a transformation in thought and understanding. This course has demonstrated the exact same process has been in effect to change our culture so dramatically.
In our course we first looked at the tools. Early in the course we read Leonardo to the Internet and a book chronicling the many new web 2.0 tools called Web 2.0 How-To for Educators. Obviously the creation of the internet, the World Wide Web, the microchip, smaller and more powerful computers, and networks both wired and wireless have all been dramatic discoveries that have enabled the creation of the web 2.0 tools documented in the other book. All of these discoveries have tremendously changed our culture in numerous ways. They’ve changed how we communicate, how we do business, our understanding of timeliness, the way we stay informed on world events, and most notably for me, how we educate our students.
The second part of our course shifted away from the tools aspect and focused on how technology has changed our ideas, beliefs, and values. We were presented with two different and opposing viewpoints. In The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, we are presented with some cautions about the impacts technology has on our culture, but also shown many examples of these cautions being expressed throughout history with many other culture changing inventions. The second book, Cognitive Surplus, lauds the internet and Web 2.0 technologies for leading us out of an era where we, and our free time, were consumed by things being fed to us by others and into an era where we are full participants. Both books focused on the larger but more abstract components of culture. They address not the tools so much, as the change in thinking and knowledge and skills that our technology has brought us.
This leads me back to an important part about how technologies develop. There is a certain amount of “which came first, the chicken or the egg” factor in looking at this. Do the tools need to come first, or do the ideas come first. I’d argue both. In the oft used example of the printing press, the tool came first and that drove the next step which was the massive change in the way people interacted with the written word. In the stone-age example I provided, the development of the tools clearly came after the new idea about planting seeds and growing crops. However, once that first step is taken it becomes a symbiotic relationship. Once people learned to stay in one place the culture continued to develop as people found ways to make the agricultural work easier, allowing some to stop working in food production all together, which led to specialization, which led to better quality products, etc.
The same is true with technology. Obviously the tools, primarily the developments of smaller, cheaper, more powerful computers, combined with the development of the Internet sparked this movement. However, since then it has been a combination of both forces to drive things forward. The development of the Internet and the 2.0 technologies, has led to a desire to stay in touch all the time, which has led to the development of better mobile devices, which has led to a higher level of connectedness, which has led the call for city, nation, even worldwide wireless access. The distinction between tools driving ideas and ideas driving tools continue to blur.
Dr. Kim has mentioned that in feedback from previous classes, she has been asked to spend more time on the tools and less time on the aspect discussing how culture has changed. I think that would be a mistake personally. I think personally that if one gains some awareness of what sorts of tools are out there, he or she can easily find and adapt something to meet whatever need. The tools are so broad and vast that to try and cover them all would be defeating a major skill necessary today which is learning how to find what you need. Being aware that this is not just about a new set of tools, but also a whole different way of thinking is much more critical. In the stone-age example the change from being nomadic hunters to stationary farmers impacted almost all other areas of culture. Technology today has that same affect.
Education was changed in both instances as well, and I believe the change in education has only just begun to occur. I heard a presentation from Steve Dembo recently that correctly summed up what has occurred and what needs to occur next in education. Thus far, technology in the education has mostly allowed educators to do old things in new ways. Teachers are using technology in their classrooms but are primarily teaching the same content. His challenge was to continue to work to make education teach new things in new ways. While I agree with him in many ways, we do also need to consider that some of the old things are valuable as well and need to be kept.
In conclusion, I can’t help but come back to the same key word I’ve come back to in other reflections, balance. Just as I enjoyed the balanced presentation of this course, I believe that things need to be kept in balance. Technology constantly changes that balance and culture needs to deal with it to find the proper balance. The atomic bomb is an example. It gave humans and ability we never previously had, the power to destroy ourselves. There was a time of great upheaval when many prepared for that on a daily basis. However, this fear has subsided, positive uses of this power have been found from this technology, and societies have learned how to balance this new power. The same will be true with the internet; we all will have to find the way to balance this tremendous new power that has been unleashed. With sound and thoughtful minds, I have no doubt that this is an attainable balance for all of us.
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