ABSTRACT
Defining technology as inseparable from human evolution suggests that tools and machines are far more than objects whose meaning is revealed simply by their purposes. Telling stories and using tools are hardly identical, but there are similarities. Each involves the organization of sequences, either in words or in mental images. Technologies have been part of human society from as far back as archaeology can take us into the past, but “technology” is not an old word in English. The ancient Greeks had the word “techne,” which had to do with skill in the arts. The full expression of a modern attitude toward technology appeared only centuries later, during the Renaissance, notably in Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis. The meaning of “technology” remained unstable in the second half of the twentieth century, when it evolved into an annoyingly vague abstraction.
