3 | Organizing Stuff to Do Stuff

Not Just Physical Objects

It is common to think of technologies as physical objects. For instance, (Akerson et al., 2018, p. 3) describe technology as “organized around a concept or principle and . . . expressed in a physical component form.” This, too, is wrong. Plenty of things that are not physical objects are commonly recognized as technologies, from university regulations to mental arithmetic to operating procedures for factories, and what made the stick that introduced this book a technology was not the stick itself but what was done with it.

In fact, every practical invention (at least) is a technology. Things that we take for granted—such as houses, plumbing, farms, canals, and road systems—are only the most obvious, but technologies run far deeper. Time itself, as we experience it, is an invention that has evolved over millennia (Frank, 2011), as is language (Changizi, 2013; Kelly, 2010; Rheingold, 2012; Ridley, 2010; Wilson, 2012), which shapes at least to some extent our very perception of the world (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980) and may be thought of, by some persuasive accounts, as an inextricable part of our cognition itself (Clark, 2008; Heyes, 2018). Reflecting this object/process duality, Schwartz (1997, p. 21) defines technology as “the use of human intelligence to create objects or processes that change the conditions of daily life.” This would not be a bad definition of education. However, the same might be said of things done by many animals, from nest building to herding, and its focus on effects tells us little about the particular nature of those objects and processes. We need to delve a bit deeper.

Not Just Tools

It seems to be natural to talk of technologies and tools in the same breath, but the two are not the same. Not all technologies can be described easily as tools. For instance, it seems to be natural to describe a pen as a tool, but not the paper on which we write with it, though both are clearly technologies, as are the things that we do when we bring the two together, such as writing and drawing, neither of which is normally described as a tool. Nuts and bolts are not, on the whole, thought of as tools, though they are clearly technologies. Tools do not have to be physically instantiated: we may use, for example, conceptual, mathematical, or theoretical tools to help us unravel a complex problem. Although many tools are technologies in their own right, some are not: sticks and stones can be tools too. What appears to be common to all tools is their relationship with an individual tool user (or sometimes a specific group of tool users) and their use to accomplish some further purpose. Whether or not they can be seen as technologies in their own right, what is done with them is almost invariably seen that way.

Technologies and Techniques

Although the term “technique” has a number of fuzzy conventional meanings and has sometimes been enlisted to refer to something different, such as Ellul’s (1970) use of the term as a means to an end, I will use it here in a familiar and straightforward way to describe how a human being does something technological. Technique is how a person does a technology. For instance, we can use different techniques for playing the violin, for driving, for cooking, or for teaching. Perhaps we use more than one technique, for instance, to strum or finger-pick a guitar. The fact that we can point to examples of different techniques or talk of “perfecting” our techniques implies, correctly, that techniques are kinds of technology—essentially those in which people play a part—but techniques are more than just repeatable methods and procedures enacted by people. Techniques are often highly idiosyncratic. It is often possible to identify, say, artists, authors, or musicians (or teachers) from their techniques.

As the notion of “perfecting” techniques implies, they can evolve over time, not (usually) from one thing to another but as variations of something that approaches some kind of ideal. However, what that ideal means is often personal. There seems to be a prerequisite complexity to an activity for it to be described as a technique. It is unusual to talk of technique when there is only one way to do something: that seems to be described better as a “method” that we implement. It would make little sense, for instance, to describe the method by which we interpret the hands on a clock as a technique for telling the time because, in the context of a clock with hands, there is no alternative that works. It is not possible to tell the time from a clock badly: it is simply wrong or right. That said, we can develop techniques for telling the time quickly, at a glance, and shortcuts for approximation that might differ from one person to the next. Technique, then, seems to embody something distinctively human, vague in its boundaries, potentially idiosyncratic, and usually capable of refinement. Understanding the nature of technique is central to the arguments that I will develop in this book about the nature of education. We will return to the concept in Chapter 5 and, more fully, in Chapter 8.

Technologies as Other, Technologies as Us

Technologies are often seen as innately separate from nature or experience. As Max Frisch (1994, p. 178) puts it, technologies are “the knack of so arranging the world that we don’t have to experience it.” Black-boxing of technologies that hides their physical and virtual inner workings from us is a largely modern phenomenon that puts this into sharp relief; though, that otherness has always been innate in our conception of all technologies. Mitcham (2009, p. 329) describes how Aristotle places the archetypal technology of writing, for instance, at two removes from experience, separated via speech. This is often seen as a bad thing. Socrates complains that writing provides only a semblance of knowing (Plato, 360 BCE), taking away a skill fundamental to being human, much as some complain of uses of the internet today. However, it is an inevitable consequence of embedding something of ourselves in our technologies and precisely what makes it worthwhile to do so. The technology does the work so that we do not have to do it. Often it does things that we could not do unaided, such as go to the Moon or lift heavy objects. It is also the scaffolding on which we build all thought and an inherent feature of thought itself. As Heyes (2018) puts it, much of our thinking relies on “cognitive gadgets” invented by others, including not just the grist of what we think about but also the mill that lets us think in the first place. Cohen and Stewart (2001) describe this complicity of thought and technologies as “extelligence.”

Technologies allow us to build upon one another’s ingenuity and invention, and they are the sources of our collective intelligence, forming, being formed by, enabling, and being enabled by the cultural, physical, and social artifacts that we share (Bloom, 2000; Henrich, 2017). As Saloman and Perkins (1998, p. 11) observe, “tools characteristically play a double role: as means to act upon the world and as cognitive scaffolds that facilitate such action.” It is difficult (perhaps impossible) to understand ourselves without taking into account the technologies that are not just tools that we use but also parts and implementers of the organization of our lives (Noë, 2016). McLuhan’s (1994) description of technologies as extensions of our central nervous systems foreshadows a modern perspective that sees technologies as inextricable parts of our minds rather than something used by them.

Clark (2008) argues persuasively that our habit of treating the mind as a process that exists solely inside our heads is unrealistic and inconsistent with our lived experiences. From “knowing” the time (because we have a watch) to expanding our cognitive capacity with a notebook, he observes, the processes of thinking are extended beyond the mental processes that occur in brains. This matters greatly to educators because of what it implies for learning and the nature of the knowledge that they seek to impart. If personal knowledge extends beyond our brains through the use of technologies, then learning itself must also be intertwingled with the knowledge of other people, mediated through those same technologies. In a real sense, we are part technology, technology is part us, and, through technology, we are part of one another.

Humans and machines are mutually affective, but the lines between them are fuzzy and shifting (Haraway, 2013). As I will explore in more detail in Chapter 6, we are co-participants in knowing and doing. Given that technologies are self-evidently developing faster and growing in number at ever-increasing rates (Arthur, 2009; Kelly, 2010), the implications for what it means to have knowledge seem to be profound. Our minds inevitably change as the world changes. It is grossly oversimplistic to react to this phenomenon by trying to teach students better ways of learning and adapting to this exponential growth, still less to try to push against it, especially since teachers are as much a part of it (and as much out of their depth) as anyone else. If we are to cope with it, then we might need to change our conceptions of what it means to know at all. We will return to this topic, too, in Chapter 6.

Things with a Purpose

Danny Hillis, only partly tongue-in-cheek, once described technology as anything that “doesn’t really work yet” (cited in Brand, 2000, loc. 189). Like Kay’s “anything invented before you were born,” it implies a view of technologies as tech, especially those combined with software, as opposed to a broader and more generic class of things in the world. However, as anyone who has ever experienced government bureaucracy or a university committee knows, the same inherent unreliability is true of process-driven technologies as much as it is of those with flashing lights or lines of code. What is most interesting about this definition, though, is the word work, which implies that technologies should do something in a particular way that achieves a particular end. However, a technology that does not work is still a technology. Intention seems to matter as well as execution.

Having a purpose (and being better or worse at fulfilling it) seems to be a critical part of any definition of technology, though sometimes—and this is often true of educational technologies—the purposes can be vague. It can be hard to provide a clear definition of the purpose, say, of a garden or painting: at the least, it might have many purposes. Part of the reason for this is that only rarely is the purpose innate to an object or process, even when the intention of its designer is clear. A chimpanzee sitting on a discarded computer is not using the same technology as its former owner because the chimpanzee not only fails to understand its intended purpose but also has no intention of using it as a computing machine: it is just a seat. Papert (1987) makes a related point that it is not possible to think of technologies other than in the context of their applications: it is not just who is using it but also why, and for which purpose. The dictionary definition of technology as the “practical application of knowledge”1 similarly implies that someone somewhere is performing that application with a purpose.

There are a couple of interesting things to note at this point. The designer of a screwdriver might intend that it should be used for driving screws, but the owner of the tool might use it for many other purposes that cannot—in principle—be known in their entirety in advance (Kauffman, 2008). There is still intent by the user, though it is not the intent of the tool’s creator. The owner effectively becomes the designer (or, if copying an existing use, user) of a different technology when using it to pry the lid from a can of paint or as a makeshift murder weapon. There is a broader issue of context and perception at work here: the creator of a technology and its user may experience it entirely differently even when apparently it works the same way for both. Indeed, “a dog may hear a symphony, but it will not hear what its master hears” (Feenberg & Callon, 2010, p. 204).

Many technologies can have uses other than those intended by their designers. It would be perfectly reasonable, for example, to think of education systems as technologies for filtering people for the benefit of companies seeking employees, or even for feeding the education system itself with more professors, though that might not have been the intentions of their original designers. At least some of the creators of educational institutions might have thought of them as systems for learning, and some of us still do. Even those who designed the original systems of accreditation that feed industry and academia might have thought of certification as primarily a means to judge the success of teaching or a way to signify that it had been accomplished. In this case, employers use a feature of an output of the education system—the accreditation of learning—as part of a different technology (a process for recruitment). Technologies meant for one purpose can become parts of the designs of other technologies and can be transformed through different uses into countless different technologies. Bijker (1989, p. 155) refers to this as “interpretive flexibility.” We will return to this concept because it is a major feature of all technologies and central to the nature of the technologies of learning.

There is a further aspect of this repurposing that demands our attention: the fact that educational qualifications are used for filtering people has fed back into the designs of education systems themselves. Demands from employers and professional bodies have long played a significant role in determining what is taught and, in many cases, how it is taught. Feedback loops abound. We shape our dwellings, which in turn shape our lives (Churchill, 1943). Just as significantly, the development of virtually all technologies is a collective endeavour, filled with connections and feedback loops that drive complex and explicable but inherently unpredictable behaviours.

Rarely the Application of Scientific Knowledge

Some, including many writers of dictionaries, see technology as the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes. Although it might be partly true of some branches of engineering, this is profoundly misleading. The invention of the vast majority of technologies has no more to do with science than it does with pulleys, which is to say a lot sometimes but little or nothing on the whole. Even creators and users of advanced technologies rarely have any more knowledge of the science behind their inventions than a New Caledonian crow bending a piece of wire to get at a bit of food uses the knowledge of metallurgy, ore extraction, and manufacturing processes that went into the production of that piece of wire. Relatively few inventions explicitly or directly employ science, though a fair number, especially those labelled as “tech,” and much of what is described as “engineering,” often do incorporate products of scientific discoveries. Most of the technologies around us, in an educational setting as much as anywhere else, are the results of different processes. Even archetypal examples of supposedly science-driven engineering such as early steam engines or the Spinning Jenny were barely if at all driven by science (Mumford, 1934, p. 215), at least as we know it today. True, there were complex webs of inspiration connecting scientific ideas and technical practices in at least the later development of the steam engine, and some relatively early examples were informed at least by advances in pneumatics and materials science (Kerker, 1961), though it is noteworthy that Newcomen, whose engine dominated the early years of steam technology, was an ironmonger, not a scientist.

In fact, the relationship between science and technology is the precise opposite of what some dictionaries tell us it is: science is the branch of technology that deals with the discovery or creation of a particular kind of systematic knowledge, itself a species of technology. As Arthur (2009, loc. 943–946) explains, “science builds itself from the instruments, methods, experiments, and conceptual constructions it uses. This should not be surprising. Science, after all, is a method: a method for understanding, for probing, for explaining. A method composed of many submethods. Stripped to its core structure, science is a form of technology.”

Science, viewed as a practice, is unequivocally an archetypal technology. In fact, it is a huge set of technologies with a huge range of applications. Naturally, they are different from other technologies, just as wheels are different from classrooms. But, equally, they share some central and significant features with all other technologies, including their usefulness when combined with other technologies. Also, most incorporate technologies in widespread use in other technologies, such as nuts, bolts, language, glassware, and arithmetic. The practice of science is fundamentally technological. As Ridley (2015, loc. 2207) puts it, “once you examine the history of innovation, you find scientific breakthroughs as the effect, not the cause, of technological change.”

If, as I suggest, education is fundamentally technological, then this raises some interesting issues, not the least of which is that it might not be (and indeed, I hope to show, cannot be, in most important respects) the application of science.

It is not just scientific practice that is technological. Much of the body of knowledge resulting from scientific practice, structured and connected, itself can be described accurately as technology. It is perfectly natural to talk of theories, equations, models, and so on as tools because that is exactly what they are: technologies for creating, discovering, manipulating, making sense of, and evaluating knowledge. Science’s many forms are unusually successful technologies insofar as they reveal a great many phenomena that can be used in other technologies, sometimes to enable something new, sometimes to improve what is already there. Much of the knowledge uncovered by science—its discoveries rather than the theories behind them—is not particularly technological in character, though it would be hard to express that knowledge without at least some technologies. At least, its discoveries require language, or mathematics, or visual technologies to describe them. Scientifically discovered knowledge can be useful in many ways, expanding the range of phenomena that we can utilize as well as act upon with other technologies. But that is not science, or the application of science, any more than the works of Shakespeare are the application of dictionaries.

Ferguson (1977) argues persuasively that technological development is at least as dependent on art as it is on science. Although scientific discoveries can contribute to the assembly, the process of technological invention and innovation is always creative and artful. Education systems are rife with technologies, from timetables to teaching methods to paintbrushes, that have (and arguably should have) little or nothing to do with the application of scientific knowledge. They are tools, of course, but many other creatures use tools in ways that closely resemble what we would recognize as technologies. It would be hard to ascribe a scientific method to the behaviour of crows. The technological church is also broad. As Franklin (1999) observes, there are as much technologies of prayer as there are technologies of transportation. If, like Hitchens (2007), we assume that all religions are inventions (or, if you are religious, all but your own religion), then religions themselves have a strongly technological character, with processes, tools, organizational features, and methods designed to achieve some end or ends, from prayer wheels to censers to mantras to litanies.

To suggest that this has anything to do with science would be to do science a disservice. To add another nail to the coffin of the “application of scientific knowledge” conception of technology, Derex et al. (2019, p. 446) found that an accurate causal understanding of scientific principles is unnecessary in the development of complex technologies that use them: “Complex technologies need not result from enhanced causal reasoning but, instead, can emerge from the accumulation of improvements made across generations.” Indeed, the complex technologies that we create collectively more often inspire science than they are inspired by it. As Henrich (2017, p. 181) tells us, “an enormous amount of scientific causal understanding . . . has developed in trying to explain existing technologies, like the steam engine, hot air balloon, or airplane.”

For Latour (1987, p. 131), “the problem of the builder of ‘facts’ is the same as the problem of the builder of ‘objects.’” At least, in constructing tools, experiments, theories, and models, and in mobilizing resources to achieve their ends, there is a strong technological aspect to every scientific endeavour. In fact, one of the most fundamental tenets of scientific thinking is that all scientific theory itself is provisional. Science itself thus effectively describes its practices and discoveries as at least in part invented, a way of understanding the world that might (and probably will) be superseded by later inventions. A classic case in point is the “replacement” of Newton’s physics by Einstein’s relativity. In fact, Newton’s theory was not replaced, for it remains a lot easier to use, more useful, and sufficiently accurate in many more contexts. Bridge builders use Newton’s equations rather than Einstein’s because, for their purposes, they are much easier and just as accurate. Both sets of theories are tools that can perform useful work as part of a technological assembly, whether the work is to explain what we observe, predict the path of a planet, or plan the trajectory of a spacecraft. It is highly probable that both theories will be replaced one day, or at least radically refined, when a theory is invented and sufficiently verified that fits better with what we know of quantum physics, but it is unlikely that we will completely stop using either, as long as they are good tools for the jobs that we ask of them.

Ways of Doing Things

For Ursula Franklin (1999, p. 62), technology is best seen as formalized practice, a perspective that leads her to define technology as “the way things are done around here.” Although this sounds a little trite and overgeneralized and is equally true of culture (which she rightly sees as intrinsically and inseparably linked), it contains some deep and important insights, carrying with it implications of cultural and temporal specificity but, more significantly if we are seeking a definition, the notion that technology is about repeatable processes and methods—the ways that things are done. Bessant and Francis (2005, p. 97) are a little more specific, describing technologies as the “ways that people get complicated things done.” Again, there is the implication of replication and method, though I would take issue with the notion that complexity needs to be involved. It often emerges from the fact that technologies allow us to go beyond what we could do easily without aid. But, equally, they can be used to do simple things better, faster, more accurately, or more consistently. Borgmann (1987, p. 28) describes technology as “the systematic effort to get everything under control,” which focuses usefully on both the replicable, ordered nature of technology and the human purposes that lie behind it.

Useful though they are, definitions that include just tools (physical and/or conceptual) and purposes tell only part of the story: to be useful for a given purpose, there must be something about the tool that fits it to that purpose, or Franklin’s “the way things are done around here,” is as specific as it gets. With such a broad definition, it is hard to think of any human activity that could not be described as a technology, including eating (applying knowledge of what is food and the effects of biting and swallowing to alleviate hunger) or scratching an itch (applying knowledge of what has alleviated itching in the past to alleviate itching in the present). Of course, there are technological elements of all such activities, including cultural norms and shared practices. Even something as apparently “natural” as a sneeze shows huge cultural variation that has little to do with physical biology. But there is something more to a technology than applying knowledge to some purpose, or we would have to include the entire animal kingdom—including slugs—in our list of users of technology as well as (perhaps) the organs in our own bodies or the growth of plants. Dosi and Grazzi (2010, p. 173) bypass this problem to describe technology as “a human-constructed means for achieving a particular end, such as the movement of goods and people, the transmission of information or the cure of a disease.”

Although they do go further than that in distinguishing the complex roles of inputs, outputs, processes, procedures, and knowledge as different though complementary aspects of the definition, this is still a little vague, inasmuch as it tells us little about the nature of that construction. It also appears to imply that humans are the only possible creators of technologies, which seems to be unnecessarily restrictive. We know, for instance, that crows make inventive uses of found objects in ways that appear to resemble closely our uses of technologies, including the pleasure that we take in using them to solve problems (Reuell, 2019). Even if we allow that some further amount of planning and shaping is needed to describe an activity as “construction,” New Caledonian crows are adept at shaping different hooks for different purposes, apparently being able to plan ahead using causal reasoning, going far beyond simple trial and error or mindless imitation (Taylor et al., 2008). Although human uses of technology are part of the definition of what it means to be human, it would be arrogant and overly anthropocentric to suggest that no other organisms use it.

Things that We Do and Things that Have Been Done

Part of the reason that it is so difficult to pin down the nature of technology is that it describes both the process of doing and what has been done. Kelly (2010) describes technology as “not a thing but a verb,” but clearly it is (at least) both. Writing is a technology—in fact an abstract technology that is neither a thing nor a verb—but so is a poem or book. I am using the technology of writing right now to write (a technology) a piece of writing (a technology) that you are most likely reading as a book (a technology created and instantiated by technologies). When we look at almost any physical technology as it exists when instantiated in the world, we can see that it embodies the processes and, most of the time, the other technologies used in its construction: it is a frozen act of doing as much as it is something that was done, and, to be describable as a technology at all, it must (at least latently) do something: it must have a reason for existence. Technologies instantiated by people—dance, say, or oration—are almost nothing but things that we do, yet we can also talk of them as concrete entities that exist as independent objects for our consideration: a dance performance, say, or speech. Both, by any definition, are unnatural activities, both are inventions, both are designed to achieve purposes, and both seem to be describable as technologies. Any definition somehow needs to take this dual nature into account.

Orchestration, Phenomena, and Purpose

In his book Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves, Brian Arthur provides some more compelling definitions that I will use as a springboard for understanding technologies in greater depth. His fundamental insight is that technologies are “the orchestration of phenomena to some purpose” (2009, p. 51). Elsewhere in the book, Arthur describes technology as the “programming” of phenomena, but this suggests an algorithmic perspective that is less descriptively rich than “orchestration” since it focuses too much on process, and it appears to downplay the equal importance of structure. By “phenomenon,” Arthur simply means something that happens or something that is: a thing, an effect, an idea, a feeling, a concept, or whatever. Phenomena exist in the world, regardless of what we do with them or to what purposes we put them, though many can occur or exist because of things that we do. Some can be mythical, others simply false. Surprisingly, in many cases, we might not even be aware that we are using them, proceeding by trial and error to achieve our goals without understanding the phenomena that our technologies orchestrate: kites and sails, for example, have flown for millennia without their makers understanding the pressure differentials that give them lift or forward motion.

More precisely than what is implied in Franklin’s use of “the way,” Arthur’s use of the term “orchestration” neatly encapsulates not just a way but also a constructed and repeatable method of organizing diverse phenomena to achieve a purpose. Phenomena can be as varied as the physical characteristics of objects to the believed nature of divine beings, from the effects of gravitation to the assembly of ideas, from the ways that wheels reduce friction to our perceptions of how people learn. Orchestrations can be diverse, from connections between transistors to methods of teaching, from assemblies of cogs to assemblies of the rules of the road, from designs of buildings to the writing of poetry. Given the growing recognition of the many actors and complex interactions involved in almost every educational process, for this reason the term “orchestration” has seen increasing use in educational literature, especially in the field of learning technologies, in recent years (e.g., Prieto et al., 2015). Arthur’s use of the term extends far beyond an educational context, and is more general in its application, but it speaks to the same need to understand the interplay of imposed order and emergent complexity in a diverse universe. When we orchestrate, we do not just aggregate a collection of phenomena. We make them work together in order to achieve some end. Ridley (2015, loc. 2120), inspired by Arthur, similarly describes technologies as ordered pieces of information, “an imposition of informational order on a random world.”

To put it more colloquially, we organize stuff (real or imagined, mental or physical, designed or not) to do other stuff. I prefer this view to Arthur’s more precise formulation of the same basic idea because it works better to highlight the deeply recursive nature of how technologies are made, to which we turn next.

Technologies Are Assemblies

Crucial to understanding Arthur’s insight and the argument of this book is that the phenomena orchestrated can be (and nearly always are) provided or exhibited by other technologies.

The phenomenon that a wheel can reduce friction, for example, means that it can be utilized in a drawer to make it easier to slide the drawer in and out. The phenomenon that a personal computer can display images means that it can be utilized to present visual information to learners, which in turn uses phenomena such as our understanding of how people learn, to bring about more effective learning. When we make intentional use of such phenomena to achieve some end, we create technologies that might be (and, as we shall see, nearly always are) composed in part or in whole of other technologies. Virtually all technologies are assemblies, often mutually constituted. Figure 1 illustrates the general dynamic of this, though in real life the implied hierarchical layers usually run much deeper, can be recursive, can loop, and the phenomena and orchestrations tend to be much more diverse than this simple diagram suggests. As Arthur (2009, loc. 567–570) puts it, “a technology consists of building blocks that are technologies, which consist of further building blocks that are technologies, which consist of yet further building blocks that are technologies, with the pattern repeating all the way down to the fundamental level of elemental components. Technologies, in other words, have a recursive structure. They consist of technologies within technologies all the way down to the elemental parts.”

The assembly can involve a great many people as well as the technologies that they use. As Read (1958) wrote over 60 years ago, no one person even knows how to make that humblest of technologies, the pencil. It is made from, and is the result of, innumerable technological processes that stretch indefinitely far and wide, involving literally millions of people, undirected by any centralized governing process, the result of a massively interconnected distributed intelligence that diffuses through time and space. This is not just a feature of manufactured items: many human-enacted systems, such as pension schemes or the internal operations of a university, are only partially understood (at best) by most of us.

Arthur’s definition neatly sidesteps the assumption that technologies must involve physical objects while avoiding the over-embracing fuzziness that makes everything into a technology. A stick fallen from a tree, by any definition, is not a technology at all. It is just a stick. However, if someone picks it up and uses it to reach for an apple on that tree, it has become a tool assembled with a method (the orchestration) using a technique (manual dexterity and pattern of movement) to achieve a purpose (getting an apple). The user of the stick utilizes the phenomena of length, rigidity, ease of handling, sharpness, and so on of the stick, along with the propensity of apples to fall when prodded, in tandem with some processes and methods to bring the two into conjunction, in order to achieve a goal that might not be possible without this or some other assembly of technologies: to get an apple. Conversely, if the stick is then rubbed against another stick to light a fire or used to point to a picture on a whiteboard, then it is not part of the same technology at all, because different phenomena of the stick are orchestrated to different purposes, assembled with different methods and techniques.

The technology of interest in any given context is rarely the one that we would say, in conversation, that we are using. It is the technology that occurs when we use it. Nothing has changed about the stick whether we use it as a pointing device, a back scratcher, or a dog’s toy: what makes it a distinct technology is the precise combination of the phenomena that we are able to orchestrate to a particular use or uses. That orchestration itself is the technology that matters most.

The same is true all the way up the technology stack. It applies at least as much to computers, classrooms, and learning management systems as it does to sticks and screwdrivers. They are parts of other technologies and not necessarily (or even often) the main technologies of interest when thinking about education as a technological phenomenon.

Arthur’s definition also encompasses cases in which physical objects are not a necessary part of a technology: business processes, rules of acquisition, examination processes, and timetabling are technologies orchestrating phenomena for a purpose as much as cars and computers, as many others have observed (Arthur, 2009; Bessant & Francis, 2005; Franklin, 1999a; Orlikowski, 1992; Zhouying, 2004).

Arthur’s definition embraces theories and models: they orchestrate phenomena to some use and in turn may be used for many other purposes in many orchestrations. It explains why technology is not the application of scientific knowledge but can (and often does) make use of phenomena discovered using scientific methods. Finally, the definition succeeds where others fail because it applies equally to both process and product. Franklin’s (1999, p. 6) dilemma of how to describe something that is “both fish and water”—both process and product—is thus neatly resolved. Technology is both something that we do and something that has been done. A computer or a nail is a technology, but so is the process of creating that computer or hammering that nail into wood. In the process of doing, we create something that has been done, and both are equally well described as the orchestration of phenomena to achieve a purpose. This is a vastly complex state of becoming, not one entity or action in isolation but a dynamic network of many, each playing its part in an overall assembly.

Arthur’s definition also embraces much, but not all, of how we communicate with others, how we express ourselves, and how we think. Although some have speculated that humans might have an innate ability for language (e.g., Hauser et al., 2002; Pinker, 1994), even if that were so, language itself is indisputably an invented and constantly reinvented toolset orchestrated to a multitude of uses such as thinking, arguing, reasoning, and communicating (Wittgenstein, 2001); naming ships and creating marriages (Austin, 1962); and, of course, teaching. It is the archetype of technologies, perhaps the most powerful of them all (Deutscher, 2006), the primary form and example of what Cohen and Stewart (2001) call “extelligence.” As McLuhan puts it, “language as the technology of human extension whose powers of division and separation we know so well, may have been the Tower of Babel by which men sought to scale the highest heavens” (1994, p. 80). Some support for this view is found in the fact that there appear to be close similarities in the use of brain regions when engaged in physical tool use and in language tasks (Higuchi et al., 2009; Uomini & Meyer, 2013) and that broader networks in both physical tool and language use are very similar (Stout & Chaminade, 2012). It appears that we use words in much the same ways that we use other technologies, though which came first remains an unanswered question. McLuhan, with delightful self-referentiality, does not even bother to draw the distinction, so closely are they intertwined: “Each of man’s artefacts is in fact a kind of word, a metaphor that translates experience from one form into another” (McLuhan & McLuhan, 1992, p. 3).

Not only spoken language but also other means of communication such as painting, drawing, dance, and music are not just technologies but also, like language, occupy a special place among our technologies inasmuch as they are also among the most important means through which the ability to create and use technologies can be passed on to others. Without them, we would be like apes, imitating one another’s use of tools, but not extending them, signalling but not signifying. Kelly (2010, loc. 209) puts it well: “Even if we acknowledge that technology can exist in disembodied form, such as software, we tend not to include in this category paintings, literature, music, dance, poetry, and the arts in general. But we should. If a thousand lines of letters in UNIX qualifies as a technology (the computer code for a web page), then a thousand lines of letters in English (Hamlet) must qualify as well.”

More poetically, William Carlos Williams (1969) describes a poem as “a small (or large) machine made out of words.” A painting, poem, or piece of music is not just the product of technologies but also a technology in and of itself, orchestrating phenomena not just of the media that it uses but also beliefs (not necessarily true or complete beliefs) about the effects that it might have on others. This affective aspect is more obvious in highly purpose-driven communication such as street signs and propaganda, but even our most abstract non-purposive signals are innately infused with communicative intent. Indeed, whether or not the intent of artists or creators is to convey anything at all, the uses to which we put their work (e.g., to decorate our homes, to listen to while working, to simply enjoy) give them a technological character: we—the viewers, listeners, readers, and so on—actively orchestrate phenomena ourselves as co-participants in their enactment. In fact, an original creator might not be required at all. My home is decorated with a fair number of found objects such as rocks and pieces of driftwood. The fact that they have been chosen, and that their placement has been chosen for aesthetic, sentimental, or practical purposes, makes them as much technologies as the human-formed sculptures and paintings with which they share the space. The same is true of many of the things that we do with nothing but our own bodies—singing, dancing, and acting, for example, as well as engaging in athletic sports and competitive games, in which phenomena provided by our own minds and bodies are orchestrated for some purpose. The fact that we tend to talk of such behaviours as “expressing” something does suggest, however, that there is something to express that might be non-technological.

There are some fuzzy boundaries between technological and non-technological forms of communication. For instance, body language can communicate someone’s state of mind or intention without being in the least bit technological. If I spontaneously twitch, or laugh, or cry, or cross my arms, then there is little or no deliberate orchestration and certainly no conscious purpose, albeit that these forms of expression can be learned and influenced by the culture to which I belong. Yet it would be a technology if I were consciously to adopt a pose or, as an actor, mimic a particular kind of body language. I would be orchestrating phenomena (my beliefs about how people will interpret what I am trying to convey, my ability to manipulate my own body, and so on) to some use (to convey to others that I am feeling, revealing a plot line, or pretending to feel a certain way to avoid hurting someone).

There are also some personal technologies that can involve no direct communication with others, such as yoga, meditation, and self-hypnotism. Most approaches to meditation and hypnotism follow a prescribed set of procedures to bring about a particular kind of mental state manufactured by an individual, making use of the phenomena of the effects of such procedures on consciousness to achieve calm, serenity, focus, or the lack of it. Equally, when we construct mental models, use words to generate ideas in our minds, memorize multiplication tables, or perform long division in our heads, the fact that they are not visible or corporeal does not make them any less technologies. This extends into many aspects of life, not all of which are even slightly technological in and of themselves but can be technologized through processes, methods, and tools designed to affect them. We are partly made, in effect, of technologies. In fact, increasingly, we tend to see ourselves as technologies. As Feenberg (2006, p. 5) puts it, “not only are we constantly obeying the dictates of the many technical systems in which we are enrolled, we tend to see ourselves more and more as devices regulated by medical, psychological, athletic, and other functional disciplines. Our bookstores are full of ‘operating manuals’ for every aspect of life: love, sex, divorce, friendship, raising children, eating, exercise, making money, having fun, and so on and so forth. We are our own machines.”