Technology is a word that covers a huge swath of the human world: from big, complex systems like the Internet or nuclear power plants to the gadgets we use every day such as mobile phones, HiFi’s or robot grass cutters. Technological advances can help to increase prosperity, improve health and wellbeing, enhance communication and social life, and even save lives. But they can also undermine existing social hierarchies, generate pollution, and even cause harm to individuals or entire groups.
The key to understanding how technology has created global change is a detailed knowledge of the technologies themselves in all their rich complexity: what they can do, what they were designed to do, and how they are actually used. This requires scholars from across disciplines to untangle the complexities of technological advancements and how they interact with the broader social, political and legal contexts in which they exist.
A core definition of technology is a ‘designed, material means to an end.’ This opens the door to considering the nature of intervening powers that technology brings into the world, whether it is the sublime power of planetary science or the mundane act of changing gear while driving a car. But it can be difficult to explore this notion of technology because we often think about’means to ends’ as a calculus of efficiency, where the choice of a particular means determines an already determined end. But the’making’ of technology involves much more than calculating the efficiency of different ways of getting to an end; it is also deliberating about what that end should be.
