Technology – A Primer –More than a Tweet, Less than a Blog

Perhaps the simplest definition of technology is that it is a tool that helps us do something.  Many creatures use tools.  For example, a chimpanzee may insert a stick into an anthill to pull out ants.  That is simple technology.  A sea gull may drop a clam onto a rock to break it.  That is technology.  A human may use a basket to collect berries. Technology again. 

As humans, we have the ability to save our knowledge and use that knowledge to combine together tools to make advanced tools.  For example, we used our knowledge of wheels and gears combined with basic math to create an adding machine. 

Fundamentally, every tool we make or use adds to our ability to do more work.  Tools allow us to do one or many things more efficiently and effectively, assuming we know how to use the tool efficiently and effectively.  Ultimately, the purpose of a tool or technology is to allow us to be more productive. 

So, why do we need to be more productive?  Well, it can allow us to make more money, or to possess more things or give us more time to do other things.  It allows us to spend less time on survival and more time on doing what we prefer.  It’s pretty simple really. 

Much of our life is spent on learning how to use various technologies to our advantage.  However, mastering a single tool or technology is no guarantee of mastering other tools and technologies.  Please bear with me as I stumble and blunder to the point.

In the early nineties, many of us became aware of something called the World Wide Web accessed through technology called the Internet.  The web was a wonderful way to communicate with others all over the world.   As humans, there are few things more entertaining than talking about ourselves.  So, the web became yet another way for many of us to talk about us. 

There were a few of us, who, though we enjoyed talking about ourselves with others, felt that other kinds of productive activity might be conducted over the web.  For example, we thought about the billions of people we could now sell products or services.  We thought about how much information we might be able to exchange with others.  We thought about not only making ourselves more productive but also ways of making others more productive.

So we evolved from basic web pages that said basically, “Here I am”, to web pages that said “Here we are and look at all the cool things that you can do while you are here”.  So web pages eventually became new places to work or get things accomplished. 

So this brings us to the point.  Why make a web page that says come into our office to pay this or get information when you can build a web page that allows people to pay you money on the site and get the information without any other action by you?

Build web sites that do most of the work for you.  Don’t build websites that create more unpaid work for you.  Simple, productive, maybe even profound.

The Geekster