You are your technology
Your body is your machinery
When we say ‘You are your technology,’ what do we mean?
Usually we consider ‘technology’ to mean some knowledge of tools and techniques applying to tools – things external to ourselves. But ‘technology’ means any technical knowledge: any knowledge of how to do something, in other words, applied or practical knowledge as opposed to abstract or theoretical knowledge.
The danger in thinking that ‘technology’ only applies to things outside ourselves is that it creates a blind spot, and we forget that we too are included. So we think of typewriters and word processors, ink and pens and books, but we forget, if you will, memory itself, and ways to remember that are strictly human, organic, and partake of ourselves. Yet these are the technologies that we can always carry with us, that are indivisible from us, and that will atrophy and fail when replaced by external tools and technologies.
To give you an example of what we’re talking about: consider the Hawaiians. When British and American seamen first encountered and traded with the Hawaiians, the seamen were amazed at the prodigious feats of memory the Hawaiians could pull off. Long lists of ancestors, of feats and deeds of their histories, tales and sagas from long ago, the Hawaiians could rattle off at a moment’s notice, seemingly without effort or fault.
The seamen, impressed with the intelligence and nobility of the Hawaiians, soon taught them to read and write.
In two generations, the Hawaiians, now quite literate, had memories no better than their British and American counterparts.
In two generations, the technology of writing had destroyed the technology of memory.
And from that point on the Hawaiians, like the rest of us, could only remember what they could carry around with them in the form of books and papers; could only commit to memory what they could write down in the fleeting moments during which they could remember it; could rely upon the integrity of their unwritten memories no better than you or I.
The same history has repeated itself wherever a people has gained widespread literacy and access to the tools and media of writing. Much the same could be said of ‘numerancy’ or the ability to reckon in figures: where written numbers and methods of figuring gain widespread use, the technology of reckoning in one’s own head declines; where electronic calculators and computers are programmed to solve more complex equations, the knowledge of even the steps needed to solve equations grows dim – is lost.
The history of the machine age has been the steady, inexorable replacement of human skills – the technology of the self – with machinery. It is also the story of our ever-diminishing capacity to remember, to think, to reckon, and to know using our own minds.
