All Is One but Not for All: Technology as an Object Encountered in the World

Abstract

In the first two chapters I was interested in exploring the language that we use to talk about technology: what that language reveals about our fears, how such language might lead us astray when we talk about what technology does, but also how we might deploy a taxonomy of effects and affects in order to better understand our expert encounters with equipment. This chapter and the next focus, instead, on exploring our physical and conceptual experiences with technology, how we meet it, and what it does. For this chapter I want to consider what it is like to encounter a physical artefact as equipment, as something to be used, and the ways in which that encounter is structured by our prior experience. I want to explore in particular how those artefacts that we use most closely, technologically, are both objects and shapers of cognition and perception, how they are both moulded in and come to mould our minds.