Effects of Media: The Technium

[Explor­ing Life] The word tech­nol­ogy can be an illu­sive term. Tech­nol­ogy orig­i­nates in the Greek tech­nolo­gia which com­bines craft (techne) and say­ing (logia). A com­mon under­stand­ing of tech­nol­ogy refers to the phys­i­cal tools and hard­ware hard­ware of an object that is designed to make work eas­ier. In this sense, tech­nol­ogy is a label that describes a mate­r­ial object. There is another more expan­sive mean­ing of the word that refers to the knowl­edge and use of tools and crafts in order to con­trol and adapt to an envi­ron­ment. Here tech­nol­ogy refers to the appli­ca­tion of human thought, per­cep­tion, craft, cre­ativ­ity, inven­tion and inge­nu­ity in order to solve a prob­lem or achieve a goal.[2]

Kevin Kelly[1] coined the term tech­nium to describe the greater sphere of tech­nol­ogy in ref­er­ence to the inter­ac­tion and inter­play that exists across all realms (includ­ing cul­ture, ethics, social sys­tems, law, art, com­mu­ni­ca­tion, lan­guage, rit­ual, soul, and con­scious­ness) of human­ity. Tech­nium is essen­tially any­thing that comes from the human mind mak­ing the core con­cept of the tech­nium vast and expan­sive. More specif­i­cally, the tech­nium as the inter­sec­tion between all pos­si­ble tech­nolo­gies is the matrix in which human­ity ulti­mately defines itself and deter­mines the future.[3]

The Root of the Technium

There are two oppos­ing views of tech­nol­ogy. One, that it of us, and the other that it is not us. The fol­low­ing is my view that it is us.

The tech­nium is nec­es­sary for us to be fully human. As we cre­ate art, invent social struc­tures and map the uni­verse we dis­cover who we are. With­out these inven­tions — even sim­ple ones like poetry, clothes, fire, and hand tools — we don’t know any­thing about our­selves. Tech­nol­ogy not only reveals our human­ness, it is the way we are human. We cre­ate our human­ness by cre­at­ing the tech­nium. (Kelly 2004)

It is dif­fi­cult to imag­ine tech­nol­ogy as being some­thing that is not part of us, though there are appli­ca­tions of tech­nol­ogy that we may wish to sep­a­rate our­selves from. For exam­ple, the tech­nolo­gies of war and envi­ron­men­tal destruc­tion are vir­u­lent tech­nolo­gies that make an uncom­fort­able con­tri­bu­tion to the def­i­n­i­tion of human­ity. Kelly works from the assump­tion that the tech­nium is nec­es­sary for us to be fully human.. It is a rea­son­able assump­tion to root the idea of the tech­nium in since the his­tory of human­ity is immersed in the use and appli­ca­tion of knowl­edge in order to solve a prob­lem or achieve a spe­cific goals.

The axial thought that the Tech­nium revolves around is that the vast tech­no­log­i­cal matrix of inter­ac­tions and inter­play is a means to inves­ti­gate, define, and evolve the essence of human­ity. On one level, the Tech­nium can be used to describe the inter­play of var­i­ous tech­nolo­gies on lifestyle, psy­chol­ogy, progress, and other aspects of human devel­op­ment. On a deeper level, the tech­nium is inte­gral to human exis­tence and evo­lu­tion and is a means to explore broad pat­terns of asso­ci­a­tion across all cul­ture and time. This, indeed, includes the spir­i­tual realm of humanity.

A Matrix of Sci­ence, Cul­ture, Com­mu­ni­ca­tion, Con­scious­ness and Spirituality

Kelly’s con­cept of the Tech­nium retrieves the ideas of pre­vi­ous media the­o­rists and extends those ideas into the realm of the inte­gral. Mar­shall McLuhan described media tech­nolo­gies as exten­sions of man and pro­posed that the medium is the mes­sage. (McLuhan, 1964) Cen­tral to his argu­ment is the idea that all media are phys­i­cal and per­cep­tual exten­sions of the human body and mind. The exten­sions of a medium form a total sur­round that has effects on the sen­si­bil­i­ties of peo­ple that is sep­a­rate and dis­tinct from the actual mes­sage being com­mu­ni­cated. His idea of tech­no­log­i­cal som­nam­bu­lism referred to an unex­am­ined use of media and the inher­ent prob­lems asso­ci­ated with it. The idea of the global vil­lage is fun­da­men­tally a warn­ing for humanity.

We need tech­nol­ogy for more than a robe; it is part of our soul. The less tech­nol­ogy we have, the less human we are; the more tech­nol­ogy we have the more human we can be. (Kelly, 2004)

The inten­tion of The Tech­nium is to describe an inte­gral view[4] of tech­nol­ogy and human­ity. If tech­nol­ogy has a dis­cernible influ­ence on our habits and pat­terns of thought and per­cep­tion, then it also influ­ences the nature of our spir­i­tu­al­ity and con­scious­ness. What affects the mind must affect both our spir­i­tual being and the nature of our consciousness.

The Tech­nium as an Axial Idea

There is a ten­dency in mod­ern soci­ety to search for axial ideas or con­cepts that serve to pro­vide unity and integrity to realms of knowl­edge that reach across all cul­ture and his­tory. An axial idea is cen­tral focal point around which other related ideas flow. The axial idea or con­cept becomes the pre­sup­po­si­tion from which inte­gral or uni­fied per­spec­tives are elab­o­rated. These per­spec­tives move toward cre­at­ing a com­pos­ite view that reveals com­mon pat­terns and themes that are found across across all time and place.

The search for unity or integrity in expe­ri­ence must also be bal­anced with a sen­si­tiv­ity toward the unique­ness and diver­sity that exists, oth­er­wise our com­pos­ite mod­els and the­o­ries of our­selves lose their vibrancy. While is is impor­tant to map out broad pat­terns that can help evolve our under­stand­ing of human­ity, there must also be sen­si­tiv­ity toward pre­serv­ing its unique and inter­est­ing fea­tures as well.

The axis of the tech­nium may be described as an inte­gral view of tech­nol­ogy and human­ity in which tech­nol­ogy is a nat­ural and inher­ent dimen­sion of what it means to be human. Some key qual­i­ties in the tech­nium would include inter­ac­tion, inter­play, rela­tion­ship, asso­ci­a­tion and pat­tern. Stated in a terse man­ner, human­ity can­not be explored from an inte­gral per­spec­tive with­out con­sid­er­a­tion of the technium.

Foot­notes

1. Kelly, Kevin. 2004. The Tech­nium: Invent­ing Our Human­ity Accessed on Jan­u­ary 29, 2009.

2. A good overview of the word tech­nol­ogy can be found in Wikipedia: Tech­nol­ogy — Def­i­n­i­tion and Usage Accessed on Jan 29, 2009.

3. deVos, Corey. 2009. Explor­ing the Tech­nium. Part 3: Human­ity, A.I., and the Great Google in the Sky. Accessed on Jan­u­ary 29, 2009.

4. The inte­gral view refers to the work of Ken Wilber