Category Archives: Activity

Activity

Activity: Defining Terms

What do the words “text” and “technology” mean to you?

Text to me is a recorded output – a text could be written, but also audible, visual, or amalgamation. Texts vary and so too do the ways we employ to interpret them.

Technology represents external tools or supports developed to enable human action. A pen is technology, so is an AWS instance. Levers are technology, so are jets. Many of the ways we use to interpret texts are technology.

Internet Age Words

Other words that may have had updated definitions based on technological change:

  • connection
  • friend
  • social
  • platform
  • content
  • sludge
  • model
  • instance

Search the OED for formal definitions and etymology

I find it interesting that text is formally defined as limited to written or printed (Oxford University Press, September 2023). My undergrad is a BFA from Emily Carr – text was treated conceptually as a wider net than something written or printed. You can investigate the ‘text’ of an audio interview, I think…

Technology is more inline with my concept, especially 4.b which directly engages with application (Oxford University Press, July 2023). The beauty of technology is the flexibility and how much it evolves with context.

Text & Technology Trends

Well here’s an interesting thing – text explodes in use in the 1500s. And as of 2019 it was coming out on top! I wonder if the repository went to 2025 if we’d see changes to this, especially considering the emergent conversations around artificial intelligence (AI) generated text. Looking back at the Oxford English Dictionary I do see many definitions generated in the 16th century – makes me wonder if that has something to do with the debut of the printing press, with an additional factor being a smaller pool of books to pull from?

Google NGram of text,technology. In the 1500s text spikes wildly before dropping down to a relatively steady line in the neighborhood of 0.004%. Technology remains lower than text at all times except between 1950 and 2000

(Google Books Ngram Viewer, 2024).

Reflection Questions

Reflecting on how technology has grown and emerged – I find it interesting that exploring the compound and derived words I see the idea of technology emerging into many different fields: manufacturing technology (1890), food technology (1905), geotechnology (1908), psychotechnology (1910), biotechnology (1921). As we get closer to the current date more localizations emerge like green technology (1983), or fintech (2006). Since it’s such an umbrella concept, marking the specific places it emerges seems like an interesting way to track its adoption. Reminds me of a slime mold, to be honest!

I also find their individual graph of the emergency of technology on its own to be interesting, if not surprising. What a spike! I again wonder if there would be changes in the last 14 years, or if we’ve plateaued in our writing about technology.

(Oxford University Press, 2009)

I referenced my background in the arts earlier when I was surprised by the limited definition of text, and then was delighted by a specific reflection prompt – why do many scholars and performers speak of performance, graphic art, etc as “text”?

I think partially it relates to blurring lines between practices – you can read a book with headphones, does that make the content no longer text? There’s also a bit of a conceptual vacuum – if there is subtext in performance, that begs the existence of text… I’ll continue to mull this over while progressing through this module.

References

Standard