Technology and the Industrial Arts in the Twentieth Century
Technology is simply the collective term for various activities and systems that are utilized to advance society. Technology is a human interaction that has significantly affected the course of mankind’s history and development. It includes a wide range of human activities, including transportation systems, computer systems, electrical engineering, communications systems, and complex systems.
The term technology is most often heard in reference to certain specific fields. In the early part of the 20th century, technology was primarily applied to describe scientific research. As technology began to become more prominent in society, it began to influence more areas of human life. Examples include the field of computers, electronics, information technology, industrial arts, and telecommunications.
One of the most influential fields in the twentieth century that technology impacted was the arts and sciences. Theodor Schatzberg was a German painter who is considered to be one of the pre-eminent artists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. His works are intricately designed portraits that are still highly regarded today. The concepts and methods used by Schatzberg, namely his geometrical and optical depiction of objects, continue to be widely used in modern art today.
A relatively new field of study called cybernetics emerged as a result of the developments and research done by Theodor Schatzberg. He conceived of a classification system based on the new technologies that were continuously appearing in modern society. The key point of cybernetics is the idea that traditional scientific disciplines were inadequate to describe the modern phenomena of information transfer and communication. Cybernetics proposes a framework of five basic technologies, each of which is designed to describe a particular aspect of modern technology. These technologies include biological, technological, informational, electrical and social systems.
In Schatzberg’s system, all technology is viewed in an analytical category of five. These categories, which are described in detail in his first work, have been implemented into many disciplines. They include physical sciences (physics, chemistry, biology, etc. ), life sciences (virology, bacteriology, zoology, etc.)
The analytical category was extended to include non-technical aspects of technology. According to the cultural approach, technology is socially established norms and structures of a society. Thus, technological practices are determined by cultural patterns and assumptions. These assumptions, which are the outcome of the dominant culture of a society, govern the choices associated with technological practice and affect the way people interact with technology.
The other two branches of Schatzberg’s study are the technical and the cultural approaches. He takes into consideration only the technical aspects of technology. His treatment of computer science, for example, does not concern itself with the question of its relationship to the arts. He thus ignores the role of aesthetic theory, as well as the related disciplines such as the aesthetic sciences.
As a consequence, the analysis of technological change in the twentieth century has taken a totally different form than it would have done if it had concerned itself with the problems of the aesthetic sciences. The focus of the later studies of technology and the industrial arts has been on the production of large-scale arts and the process by which these large-scale works of art influence the masses. Consequently, the analysis of technical changes through technology is no longer based on the problem of understanding how new forms of technological practice are embedded in the architecture of the twenty-first century. Instead, the focus has been on understanding how technological change drives social change. This focus, however, makes the study of technology more difficult than it might otherwise have been, since it means that we must pay more attention to how technological practices themselves have changed over time and to the changes they have brought about in the forms and purposes of the things that they replaced.
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