Between Fascination and Shaping
François Osiurak · 2020
While tools fascinate us, some of them also shape us by imposing their use on us, reflecting the technical heritage of our predecessors. This chapter details this phenomenon, which will also lead us to detail the processes of social transmission that underlie the emergence of a shared technique, which supports our technological evolution. We have a Tool instinct that constantly encourages us to generate new physical problems and therefore new solutions. Our Tool instinct is at the origin of the phenomenon of technical stigmergy, encouraging us to relativize any technological progress by considering it as a source of new physical problems to be solved. During our evolution, this we have made increasingly complex tools, generating a distance between the maker and the user. The technological evolution evoked in Man has been magnified by our ability to extract information from our social environment, so that it can be characterized as cumulative.