[Editor’s Note: This is week five of the From the Garden to the City Blog Tour]
In about two weeks, I’ll be in a room with two women. One of them will be my wife. The other will be the operator of a sophisticated piece of sonar imaging equipment. This sophisticated piece of sonar imaging equipment, which probably has itself thousands of intricate and sophisticated parts put together by machines with equally thousands of intricate and sophisticated parts, will enable me and my wife to find out whether we’ll be having a baby girl in about six months or a baby boy (also in about six months). That baby also has thousands of intricate and sophisticated parts, but I’m not so concerned with her at the moment.
Yes, we’d like a girl.
This operator will share in our deeply intimate moment of joy. Social convention decrees that she will print out a picture from her sophisticated piece of sonar imaging equipment, which we will take gladly, and adhere to our sophisticated food-cooling apparatus. With a magnet. Which isn’t terribly sophisticated, but is terribly useful.
So far, John Dyer, in his chapter on defining technology (helpfully titled “Definition”) will have identified four different levels of technology. Skeptical though you may be, let’s walk though them.
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