Technology, like art, is a soaring exercise of the human imagination. Art is the aesthetic ordering of experience to express meani...ngs in symbolic terms, and the reordering of nature--the qualities of space and time--in new perceptual and material form. Art is an end in itself; its values are intrinsic. Technology is the instrumental ordering of human experience within a logic of efficient means, and the direction of nature to use its powers for material gain. But art and technology are not separate realms walled off from each other. Art employs techne, but for its own ends. Techne, too, is a form of art that bridges culture and social structure, and in the process reshapes both.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To de-animalize human mentality, to purge it of obsolete evolutionary characteristics, in particular of death,... which foreknowledge terrorizes the contents of skulls with, is the fundamental project of technology;LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Wildness and silence disappeared from the countryside, sweetness fell from the air, not because anyone wished them to vanish or fa...ll but because throughways had to floor the meadows with cement to carry the automobiles which advancing technology produced.... Tropical beaches turned into high-priced slums where thousand-room hotels elbowed each other for glimpses of once-famous surf not because those who loved the beaches wanted them there but because enormous jets could bring a million tourists every year--and therefore did.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A central theme in the speculative writing on technology of the past century is that forms of technics, like forms of biological l...ife, undergo a process of evolution. With the passage of time, newer and more sophisticated varieties of apparatus, organization, and technique rise to replace older, simpler varieties. New technologies enter into areas of social existence where they had not been previously. Just as Darwin observes that the various species of life on the Galapagos Islands tend to specialize and diversify into particular biological niches, so it is that forms of technology continually spread into fresh areas of social utility. In both number and diversity the kinds of technical artifice available to human societies increase.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Parental attitudes have greater correlation with pupil achievement than material home circumstances or variations in school and cl...assroom organization, instructional materials, and particular teaching practices.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The discussion of the whole problem of technology ... has been strangely led astray through an all-too-exclusive concentration upo...n the service or disservice the machines render to men. The assumption here is that every tool and implement is primarily designed to make human life easier and human labor less painful.... But ... homo faber, the toolmaker, invented tools and equipment in order to erect a world, not ... to help the human life process. The question therefore is not so much whether we are the masters or the slaves of our machines, but whether machines still serve the world and its things, or if, on the contrary, they and the automatic motion of their processes have begun to rule and even destroy world and things.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As I sit looking out of a window of the building I wish I did not have to write the instructional manual on the uses... of a new metal. I look down into the street and see people, each walking with an inner peace, And envy them--they are so far away from me! Not one of them has to worry about getting out this manual on scheduleLESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind--mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising..., the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the preempting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer's task is to invent the reality.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either ...we use those languages, or we remain mute.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »