Technology News
Yet even for a current English word ‘technology’ has come to embrace often conflicting meanings. First, I will provide a abstract of Eric Schatzberg’s important new opus Technology, which untangles and clarifies the historical past of ‘technology’ and its cognates as actors’ categories. So ‘technology’ entered the 20th century because the science of the economic arts, a term of artwork for the German cameralists and a brand-like placeholder term in the United States. Yet in the end the German concept of Technik would have much larger influence. After 1850 German engineers embraced the term Technik in a broad sense, not restricted to a means-to-ends rationality however a coherent and culturally significant category masking the arts of fabric manufacturing. Let us start with the instrumentalist approach that technologies are means to ends and see if it can be improved. Prayers, spoken language and swimming strokes are means to ends; two of them are techniques and as such they share a