Technology as a socio-historical phenomenon

Abstract

The article reveals the authors' vision of the essence of the technology as a sociohistorical phenomenon. It is based on the idea that technology is not only a set of technical devices but a segment of the general system – a society – located between a social medium and its natural surroundings in the form of a peculiar social technosphere, which simultaneously separates and connects them. The main objective purpose of the technosphere is to promote the effective rendering of society-generated entropy outwards; it defines the features of the technosphere as a sociohistorical phenomenon. The analogues of such material formations take place also in wildlife (from the spider-web to the beaver dam) but are very few and arise from the implementation of instinctive programs of the species. In a person's consciousness, such programmes are not given by “nature”, they are formed on the basis of “desobjectivation” of technical objects available in society. In the process of “desobjectivation” the essence, the “logic of the subject” becomes the achievement of a person and due to his abilities is filled with new meaning. As a result, the technology is a materially ideal phenomenon: on the one hand, it is a set of technical objects and on the other hand – technical thinking of a person, the highest manifestation of which is technical sciences nowadays. Properly technical objects are created by society to meet the individual and social needs of a person. These are primarily consumption items; due to their manmade nature, the question of production means development arises, which over time becomes increasingly important, especially by virtue of their significant impact on social relations (which in time also require certain technical devices for their implementation). The complex of these devices forms the techno sphere of society as a compound integrity. Not only groups of different in application technical objects become the constituent parts of the technosphere, but also their conglomerates designed to perform certain functions, which, similar to the biological branch, were called techno enosis; in the latter at the account of a peculiar “competition”, the development of these components in particular and the technosphere integrally takes place. However, despite consistency, the technosphere is a subsystem of a society, therefore, there is no perspective of creating certain laws of its development and an appropriate coherent periodization. For this reason, the scientific periodization of the development of technology as such is connected with the purpose of the given research and is defined by it.