ABSTRACT
The relation between technology and thought has been penetratingly discussed by Bolter 1 . Technology shapes thought. Pottery, for example, was a ‘defining technology’ for the Greek philosophers. The potter holds an ideal image of the pot to be produced – the eidos – and molds the clay accordingly to produce an imperfect approximation of the ideal. Plato’s doctrine that ideal a priori forms are the true reality, which the manifest things of the world but imperfectly realize, reflects this technology. The clock was a defining technology for pre-twentieth century physics. Thus Laplace conceived of the entire universe as a mechanistic clockwork following completely deterministic Newtonian laws. Descartes thought of animals and La Mettrie included man as clock-like. The contemporary ‘Turing’s man,’ às Bolter calls us, takes the computer as defining technology and even conceives man in the image of the computer. Similarly, the technological achievement of holographic image production, based on Gabor’s Nobel-Prize-winning work in microscopy (reprinted in Stroke 2 ), has played the role of defining technology for late-twentieth century holistic thinkers.
