The Relationship between technology and culture

Okay, this isn't about evolution or creation. At all.Its been prompted by the discussion in the Faith and Belief forum at the moment that has veered into talking about animal tool use. However, it doesn't have any direct relevance to that either; that discussion has merely reminded me of an argument I once had with someone that I now want to discuss.As the title suggests, I want to talk about the relationship between culture and technology. My belief -- which has, with one notable exception, remained untested by serious discussion -- is that the level of technology that a culture has attained at any given time has a direct effect on the possibilities for social organisation and complexity in that group. That doesn't sound contentious to me at all: it seems almost self-evident. If you don't have some method of making written records (preferably portable) then you can't have a complex civil service or tax raising powers. If you don't have ploughs and domesticated animals, then you have to spend a great deal more time labouring in the fields. And so on. New technology effects social restructuring. Easy as that.As I've been intimating, I once mentioned this belief to a very smart history/economics post-grad friend. He disagreed strongly, and said that it was a very simplistic view, because it is very hard to define what technology is exactly. His response was, I think, what about ideas? Is democracy a technology?I wasn't sure, but he seemed to have a point. At the same time, I felt like he wasn't quite getting my argument. Is large scale democracy workable without a portable method of keeping records, and a great many other things besides? I don't know. But I've been thinking about this topic on and off since, and its still bugging me.Some time later, I read an interview with Gibson, the writer of that seminal cyberpunk novel. He professed a similar belief, but he veiled it with a kind of embarassed sounding caveat, as though it was rather a guilty indulgence to believe such a thing.Many of you seem pretty smart. I was just wondering if someone here could put me straight on why this idea stinks?

I really appreciate any contributions that anyone is willing to make. Keep them coming.With regards to this whole technology issue, I get the feeling my reasoning might be a bit wobbly somewhere, or that my conclusion might actually be some really underwhelming generality. It is of course quite probable that I AM talking out of my arse, and I will happily concede that as soon as I can be shown why. But while I'm still unsure, I'm going to try to keep flogging it.Okay. Definitions. I'm just going to write my most immediate thoughts because I want people to show me exactly where my feeling that this idea makes sense fails. (This has the added bonus for a lazy person such as myself of not requiring much genuine enquiry and thought.)Technology. For my purposes technology refers to man-made things, tools, artefacts. It doesn't have to refer to the processes required to make them, because these find their expression in other artefacts (e.g. - if you want to make a sword, this isn't made from steel plus smelting plus blacksmithing, its made from bellows, a crucible, a hammer, an anvil (or whatever, I don't know how you make swords) and crucially, a series of people trained in their use. What does it do? Well it enables us to accomplish things that we couldn't otherwise, or it allows us to accomplish things individually with much greater efficiency than we could manage otherwise. Add this effect up across a society and it enables different ways of inteacting and social organisation.Social organisation. As far as I'm concerned, this could refer to modes of government generally, but I believe it might also have more specific applications to understanding how smaller social units like families or tribes might work. If you have a knowledge of how difficult it is to master a particular society's tools, then you can predict how specialised into trades its workers might be, for instance. If workers are strictly divided into trades or adapt to many different roles probably has quite profound effects on a culture. I just can't quite think what they are. I think there is definitely an economic element to all this too.Complexity. Hmm. Maybe its easier to define when I'm strictly talking about social structuring. Perhaps I mean that the more advanced technology a culture employs, the larger the conglomeration of people that can be sustained? That would explain why the population today is so artificially high for a mammal of our general sort of physiology.I don't actually agree with holmes' comment that maybe this idea might profitably be restricted to communications technology. It seems that it applies to all kinds of technology. To demonstrate why, it might be simpler to talk about the very early stages of tool development for simplicity's sake (but I believe that this idea should apply to us internetty, mobile phoney lot too).
Obviously, the harder a tool is to use effectively, the longer it takes to learn. In any culture where even a rudimentary box of tools exists, there is likely quite a lot of specialisation for the simple reason that there isn't enough time for someone to learn to be a master carpenter, tanner and fisherman (and similarly, there isn't enough time for anyone to effectively practice all of these trades at the same time). Now. Does the development of increasing ranges of more complex tools result from on the increasing specialisation of different occupations, or does the increasing specialisation of different occupations result from the development of increasing ranges of more complex tools? (catches breath)
To me it seems clear that the jobs that people try to do are limited entirely by the tools that are available to them. 'Aha!' You cry. 'So where does technological innovation come from, Smartypants?'Well, looking back over human history and pre-history I actually think that technological innovation is not the rule, but rather the exception. Since the agricultural revolution a few thousand years ago things have been really picking up, but there was a much greater time before the dawn of bread when, as far as we can tell, technological innovation was going at a snail's pace. Technological development seems to have followed an exponential arc, where tool gives birth to tool until things are progressing now at a pretty blinding pace, from generation to generation, rather than from millenia to millenia. Of course, this is in part due to the pooling of global resources and brains - but ultimately, it is the development of communication technologies over the past 150 years that have enabled this... so in a sense, this demonstrates how technology begets technology and the whole exponential thing happens.But I want to return to the question of where technological innovation can come from if we are entirely constrained by the tools available to us. I think there are two ways that technology can provide us with new tools, and ultimately new ways of being socially organised. Firstly, tools can be appropriated for novel usage to enable new things to be accomplished that previously could not. Also, people can use existing tools to fashion a new tool that fulfills a need. The emphasis here for me is on the severe constraint on innovation that is put in place by the fact that one can only make technological solutions to problems when you have all the tools to make the new tool. So teleporters, for the moment at least, are right out - even though we can imagine them. Similarly, prehistoric hunter-gatherers might have been able to imagine huge sustainable gatherings of people living in cities, but they wouldn't have had the tools to design such a place to last indefinitely. So humans are not necessarily limited by their imaginings, but rather the tools, the technology that is available to them at any particular moment.Oh, before I forget, I'd like to mention the website:I bring it up because holmes made a passing reference to one of this guy's bugbears. I think this website is really well designed and his theory really well presented. It seems that idle theory even has applications in evolutionary thought.This message has been edited by Tusko, 02-22-2005 10:11 AM

Yes, I see your point actually.. and I guess that's the one that holmes was making as well... maybe the weather machine wouldn't change our culture as such... let me think about this a bit. I'm not actually sure how this fits in with what I was thinking.

...Do you mean... I've gone and invented Marxism? If only I'd thought of it 160 years earlier! Tuskoism has a certain ring to it.My understanding of Marxism is pretty limited, but I got the impression that dialectical materialism or whatever it's called was actually a one way street. I'm not so sure if this idea of the relationship between technology and culture is like that. It might claim to have some predictive powers about social organisation, but I personally don't believe that it would predict that all societies were heading towards socialist enlightenment. Maybe thats a hideous misrepresentation. If so, sorry. If any predictions were to be made on the back of this idea, I think they might be related to economics or work. I don't really know.This message has been edited by Tusko, 02-22-2005 10:59 AM

Ah.. okay. That's a helpful post, thanks. I'm aware that I'm just writing and writing here. It might just be total bunkam. Sorry if it is.I think it very likely that there are lots of things that impinge on how groups of people interact and organise themselves, economically and socially - not just technology. But at the moment I'm just toying with the idea that you CAN be really reductive and say that available technology not only limits what people (singular and plural) can and can't achieve, but that it also has a profound affect on the aspirations and desires of people - that perhaps it is of foundational importance. E.g. If you have a spear, a dream of outlandish success is ten buffalo. If you have a bank account and a hand blender it might be rather different.Maybe that's much too reductive a claim. Can someone explain why?This message has been edited by Tusko, 02-22-2005 10:53 AM

I think I've been talking rubbish.Each and every new device doesn't necessitate changes in the way that people relate to each other or society is ordered. For instance, Tamagochi's probably didn't change the world; but they used technology that has world-changing applications. This would mean that my initial definition of technology as simply objects is well off the mark because then we have two distinct categories: world changing objects and mundane objects - and how do you know to which group any particular artefact belongs? Something that seems trivial at any one time might later take on a massive cultural significance.To me at least, the whole way I was thinking was founded on the idea that the relationship between individual people and the tools that they used had a bearing on how larger aggregations of people interacted.But I'm not sure if that's right if you can't tell which technologies are going to make significant changes in the way that people interact and which are merely fashionable.Things like bicycles, mobile phones and books are really fantastic designs that are, for want of a better word, evolving, as new materials and scientific understandings become commercially reproducable.Urm... I've forgotten what my point was. End of ramble.

I think I'm seeing why I was being simplistic now, but I'm still not sure for some reason. I'm so used to thinking that my idea made perfect sense I'm just a bit confused now.The stuff you were saying about technology having an effect on perception of time sounded very interesting. An aquaintance of mine at university was doing a disseratation about the impact that the introduction of a town clock had on medieval/renaissance society. I never read it but I'm pretty sure that the impact would have been profound. We take the idea of an actual, correct time so for granted that we forget that it is only a very recent human invention. If the human race ever makes it off this planet and starts inhabiting our nearby neighbours (and space itself) I wonder what effect the different planetary cycles and the delay in interplanetary communication would have on the perception of time. But that's rather off the point.Or maybe its not. Maybe the unexpected nature of the relationships between developments in technology and human perceptions is kind of what I'm talking about. You wouldn't think that the invention of safe, cheap interplanetary travel would necessarily have an effect on the way we percieve time, but it does. Or maybe that's not accurate - its not the invention as such, but the use that we put it to that means that we start to change our understanding.Complicated.

Hi there, thanks for you input. It seems really relevant.I guess the shortcomings of this way of looking at the world are apparent to all - as you yourself pointed out, there are always going to be exceptions, or the generalisations that you draw are going to be questionable.Environmental Determinism sounds like a great label for this kind of thing. I'm intrigued that you say that it isn't socially acceptable - obviously I haven't though it through far enough!