#+TITLE: Technology #+ROAM_ALIAS:

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• Technology is an extension of our will

“Our technologies can be divided, roughly, into four categories, according to the way they supplement or amplify our native capacities. One set, which encompasses the plow, the darning needle, and the fighter jet, extends our physical strength, dexterity, or resilience. A second set, which includes the microscope, the amplifier, and the Geiger counter, extends the range or sensitivity of our senses. A third group, spanning such technologies as the reservoir, the birth control pill, and the genetically modified corn plant, enables us to reshape nature to better serve our needs or desires. The map and the clock belong to the fourth category, which might best be called, to borrow a term used in slightly different senses by the social anthropologist Jack Goody and the sociologist Daniel Bell, “intellectual technologies.”

Our technologies extend and expand our wills - we can dig for longer and deeper with shovels and then JCBs, we can perceive more with magnifying lenses and then microscopes, we can shape and control our environment and bodies with fans, AC and medication and finally we have tools which help us extend, expand our supplement our intellectual capacities.

Notes From: Nicholas Carr. “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains”. Apple Books.