Once chosen, however, technologies themselves can exert a powerful influence on future choices. To some extent, definitions of technology vary from one discipline to another. We believe that defining it as the sum of the methods by which a social group provides itself with the material objects of their civi lization is sufficiently concrete without being too confining and without being misleading. It is important to specify the word material, for there are of course techniques having to do with everything from poetics to sex to bureaucratic administration. Some might go further and specify that material be taken to mean three-dimensional things, and this seems satisfactory as long as one bears in mind that even an abstraction such as a computer program, or an idea for the design of a machine, or an ideology such as technocracy or scientific management is contingent upon its expression in tangible artifacts.
Technology is a modern word, dating to the early nineteenth cen tury.
Its first well-known usage was in an 1831 treatise by Jacob Bigelow titled Elements of Technology . For some time after that and perhaps even today it was not a term known to every culture. Mechanical arts, used in medieval and early modern Europe, is not entirely synonymous, since this term included things like painting and sculpture as well as machin ery, mills, and the like. Technology encompasses various actors catego ries in diverse historical cultures, and that is part of the reason why con temporary scholars define it variously. Every generation writes its own history, said Carl Becker.