tech • nol • o • gy | tek'näl?j? |

noun (pl. -gies)

ORIGIN early 17th cent.: from Greek tekhnologia 'systematic treatment,' from tekhn? 'art, craft' + -logia 'knowledge', originally in reference to grammar. In the mid-1800s applied to industry and industrial works. Finally, circa 1964, 'High Technology' was coined for the overtures of the digital age.

Like most words, its meaning has followed the pursuits of those who use it, mirrored the world in which it is uttered, and dissolved its connotations from one web of meaning into another, gently pulling its associations along with it.

An object of art or craft would, at one time, leave my hand and fall into yours; an exchange of goods would (somewhat inaccurately) bring equivalence to the transaction; and your production might feed my belly while the work of my hands fed your heart or your mind. Today, however, the gathered production of 400 billion suns is softly, distantly falling over a span of years, sifting down into the upper atmosphere of this minute planet, received there by an even more minute chip of metal atop a Chilean mountainpeak: a trade we establish… without return.

What we took for a band of shining dust is no more than our local neighborhood — an unimaginable multitude of stars, around whose warmth are huddled equally uncountable planets burgeoning with life — and that knowledge made us all as insignificant and grand as we could be. We thought we were alone? We thought we were unaccompanied?