Technology as Skills
James K. Feibleman · Technology and Culture · 1966
The world inhabited by the modern human individual is largely a man-made world. It is a world of artifacts, of material things, of cultigens, and of sounds altered through human agency, all designed for his use by his fellows. Houses, streets and vehicles, farms and factories, cultivated plants and domesticated animals, machines, and languages, make up the bulk of his environment, each requiring for its management some particular skill. What humans make is a rearrangement of nature, and so the artificial is not to be set off from the natural as though opposed to it but considered rather a special subdivision of it. Beyond this man-made world there is another and larger segment of his environment consisting of that relatively small part of his immediate environment which he has not changed, and beyond that immediate environment the great astronomical universe which affects him but which he has not yet been able to affect except in a very limited way. Thus his world is for the most part one of his own making, and his life is lived largely in it. For using it as well as for making it, special skills have been required. He develops and then passes them on to the members of successive generations through the external process of learning. Culture is an amorphous collection of specially made material things and of the knowledge of how to handle them. How to make them and what they can do for us or what their use tells us about the world are matters of practices and theories, respectively, both of which are learned. The practices derive in large measure from the theories combined with experience and routinized as skills. The term skill has many meanings, most of them centered around the combination of practical knowledge with ability, but I wish to make it more precise even at the cost of being somewhat narrower. Skill here, then, will mean proficiency in the use of artifacts.