Evidence of Unpredictable Outcomes of Technologies in the Sequence of the Very Earliest "Technics"

The way one might typically think of animal husbandry coming about would probably center around capturing animals, then separating out the weaker, smaller ones to prevent their breeding, and to promote the breeding of the bigger ones.

We probably don't think of the role of dogs in all that. Of training dogs, and then, perhaps, of training ourselves.

We also probably don't think of castrating male animals as being the first successful surgical procedures that allowed us to then perform surgery on ourselves, and to begin to see our bodies are technologically manipulable.

And, it's unlikely we'd think of fire leading to the domestication of dogs, which would then lead to "technics" that would be critical for, well, civilization! Mumford's descriptions of the plausible developments of our earliest technologies lets us consider the following sequence of innovations: walking hands-free upright >> mastering fire (can run away from fire while holding it at a distance from the body perhaps? any other ideas?) >> odoriferous food >> dogs attracted to the food >> selective rewarding of dogs >> use of dogs in herding >> sedentary agriculture >> concentration of wealth in cities >> yada yada >> more yada yada >> sex in the city / "Sex in the City," or just those kinds of cities and that kind of sex, i.e., our contemporary societies and cultures today!

The point is that Mumford shows repeatedly in this first half of "Technics and Human Development," that technologies are indeed ecological. He gives us evidence of how unpredictable the outcomes of technologies are as he traces sequence of our very earliest of technologies. Who knew technology X would lead to technology Z? Who knew dog training might be such a critical innovation for developing the sophisticated cultures and institutions we now have?

Of course, there are alternative paths of development--maybe dogs weren't that important--but the fact that many such paths are equally plausible means the sequences technological innovations are unpredictable. Moreover, we can see how they are ecological, since at each step we can see how an innovation (technology X) intentionally designed to do one thing, also unintentionally affects other things, which then produce a new context and environment of opportunities for subsequent innovations.

And that's why I originally scheduled us to read this text after Postman, but also thought it would work at the course's end, when we need to be reminded of technology's ecological nature when considering the specific technologies examined in our respective research papers, and when trying to understand and forecast the effects of our media, post-Meyrowitz's day of fewer channels, and the "web 2.0", i.e., the internet post-"Communities in Cyberspace".

What could our new contexts lead to? What is already emerging? Feel free to comment!