No please don't take this away from me. It's one of the last things I have that help me feel normal. It's a net positive on my life. It's queer, it's outspoken, it's fresh, it's thoughtful. What reasons do you have that I shouldn't use tiktok?
Hey don't bring tiktok into this. I've discovered quite a bit of good music, political uprisings, neat hobbies, beautiful art and artists of all kinds, philosophical concepts, and wonderful ways to look at life on there. Like those two hiker guys from "we love you" that talk about being present and coping with and appreciating life.
What? When? I'm not a Superman fan, but even I know he was born on Krypton or whatever his planet was, and his parents were royalty I think, and they sent him to Earth as a baby to survive, where he was raised by farmers to be a GOOD YOUNG AMERICAN WHITEBOY but then he discovers his powers and thankfully his parents were actually good people and not goddamned nazis and he goes around helping people and fighting his greatest enemy, Lex Luthor that bald guy that represents capitalism whose name is way too close to the Christian devil.
Same-sex attraction is more widely reported for Millennials than older generations. In fact, fewer than half (46%) of Millennials say they are completely heterosexual, according to new research from YouGov RealTime.
Lol yeah, it's kind've just how I am I think. I think anthropology and philosophy are important and that everybody should be exposed to them early on in life. I've heard interesting counter arguments against universal public exposure, and I definitely agree that having everybody think the same thing is bad. But I think something needs to be done about the universally low level of consideration just in general. Think of how much more cool shit we could come up with if we put everybody's minds to it! (And how many fewer shitty people there would be!)
I actually explicitly went out of my way to not read the dictionary definition. I think that semantically those definitions are important as pillars, But I also think it important for us as humans to... Occasionally reassess the state of the wheel from the ground up, so to speak.
I think it's important to look at it from a human perspective, and that's kind of what a psychology/philosophy/anthropology/sociology/perspective is, rather than what I will reductively call a slave/tool-mindset of simply focusing productivity and tools, math-and-science above existentialism-and-morality. In other words, I think it's of utmost importance to keep in mind what the tools do and how they serve us, both in the small immediate picture, but also the larger grand scheme of things.
So if you wish to limit the definition of technology to those things, then, sure, they are not technology, as they obviously do not fit your definition. In which case, our conversation stops. There's nothing wrong with that.
However, if you've any interest and continuing the conversation either with me, with someone else, or even with yourself of your past or your future, it is very interesting, and dare I say important, to consider a broader definition of the concept. Then, you can categorize subspecifics as things like "electronic technology" or equipment and industrial tools and ideas. To which, I might be surprised that people still use things like scythes or Morse code (and not just hobbyists or conspiracy theorists, either).
Doing so, allows you to ask such questions as: "what role does technology play in society?", "Why do we stop using certain technologies?", "What technologies are needed?", or even "Am I technology?"
It defines the limits of your existence and helps you have a greater understanding of yourself, others, history, the future, and the universe. I would not shame you for being disinterested in those things, but I would be genuinely surprised if you were truly disinterested.
As a side note, I want to express my disdain for the short-format forum-thread comments that are so prone to snap-back clever quips based upon warped semantics and appealing to the audience. Too often, semantics disagreements or even strategic rhetoric stand in the way of useful discussion. It's entirely about the semantics. And while that may be a tangent from OPs surface intention, I would argue that a deeper discussion of society and communication would be welcome and more interesting and important. Again though, it's not for everyone; some people just want videos of cats. I just.... I need more depth and maybe this is all misplaced. If so, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to derail this hard.
Oooo, I haven't had the Lindt ones. Nicest packet ones I've had are the Ghirardelli ones that come in different flavors. Those are always delicious. I'll have to keep my eyes peeled at the store for the Lindt ones though.
What's the best hot chocolate/cocoa you've ever had?
Insanely nostalgic for long roadtrips where you'd stop at a rest stop in the middle of the night to use the bathroom and stretch, and there'd be people with hot water, styrofoam cups, and packets of tea, coffee, cocoa, and cider for free. Core memory, right there.
So I see technology as something that is developed to be explicitly used to solve a problem or impart change, that is identifiable as its own thing, and so can be used but then also may be eventually made obsolete. Right? Like clay usage or refrigeration. It's all just a means to an end.
So an animal comes along, and doesn't have scrape-two-rocks-together to make fire, and then later does, that would be a technology.
Another way to think of it, which is... Admittedly, kind of embarrassing, but I do think makes sense, is if you could "develop it" or even theoretically see it being developed in a strategy game like Age of Empires or Civilization or something.
So, humans have not always had, and eventually developed marriage (I'm not talking about love, as that is a VERY different thing and not my words or choice of topic, for now, as that's even more of a stretch, and I'm not surprised that we still use it) in its current form at some point. Somebody in history thought it would be a good idea, and it got popular and caught on (another indication that it could be technology).
Similarly, tribalism and war also evolved in similar ways.
Tribalism did not exist, somebody thought it was a good idea, it got popular, and now we have moved on, with some vestigial brain habits, because current society does not really need it to survive, but because how society is now is only like 200 years old (and because almost all humans still practice some form of it, including those excluded), evolution hasn't yet removed our expectations of it. It is a biological need, like somebody else said, but I'm arguing that it, itself, is a developed technology as a means to an end that we will/may evolve past our already decreased need for - we just had this very social behavior for such a long time that it became ingrained into our biological expectations and reliances. I'm not a sociopath or psychopath, but some say that those could be attempts at evolving past tribalism or social behavior reliance. In some ways, if they are, they are VERY successful, as they absolutely do not rely on tribalism, but rather massively exploit it, to their own enormous success (business executives like CEOs have a high prevalence of sociopathy).
War, too, did not exist for a very long time. Especially formalized war. It still exists absolutely, and may soon come to be used again. But, regiments of soldiers standing in rows on a battlefield, waiting to try to kill each other is the tool of nations to exert power. Small, informal war is the tool of smaller communities, and so on and so forth... But, war of any kind still needs to be defined abstractly, too. So maybe we could call it: committed violent conflict towards an other entity. Right? Because one has to either outwardly or inwardly "declare war" on something or someone - a country on a different country, a people against another people, a people on a country, a country on a people, or, metaphorically, a toddler on a parent, a company on another company, a neighbor on another neighbor, or the HOA against a resident, whatever. In the literal examples though, they are all committed declarations of violence against an other something. War then, may have evolved from the emergence of peace, I don't know. But war as a thing can not have always existed (enter intrusive thought of the animal kingdom being hell and constant war and thousand-eyed staring crabs and epic music) and at some point evolved into the tool we have known for thousands of years.
John Lennon imagined a world without war, as if to ironically imply it was a dark constant of living... But he still imagined it - he still imagined a world where we have evolved past the need for it - past the need for that technology to solve problems.
The important distinction here I think may be less about which of these specific things are or aren't technology, but seeing humanity's accomplishments, as dark as they are, as the technologies that we have developed, and therefore will eventually supersede the need for. Fire, marriage, cookies/candy, tribalism, war, pagers, fax machines, paint, or cars. I'm personally invested in the need to get past marriage, as where I live, it's only limited to abrahamic religions' formats, mainly Christianity, and therefore only one other person, and if the more core of them had their way, between only a cishet man and a cishet woman, for the sole purposes of rearing offspring and spreading the religions (technology) and cultures (also technology and subset technologies) more.
Just because something is a political ideology, doesn't mean it can't also be a hobby.