Techniques and Technologies: A World-Economy Perspective

Techniques and Technologies

Techniques are the knowledge, skills, and tools used internationally to achieve a goal, such as creating management systems or knowledge that can generate inventions to facilitate a particular job.

Technologies are applications of scientific knowledge to the production of useful objects.

Brief History of Techniques

It was only in the late eighteenth century, with the Industrial Revolution, that human productive capacity became sufficient to make extensive and deep changes. The industrial age is responsible for the emergence of technical means, made up of industrial concentration, farmland, cities, and infrastructure established over the last two centuries.

World-Economy

The initial cycles of the industrial era opened the door to the formation of the world economy, i.e., the integration of all peoples and continents through market channels and centralized investment by the industrial powers.

Global Village

In the 1960s, the communications theorist Marshall McLuhan coined the term "global village." With technological advances in transportation and communication, people around the world would build a great community, sharing products, information, customs, and world views (Globalization).

McLuhan viewed this positively, believing that besides being an inevitable development, it would contribute to the end of wars and establish a "universal culture." Other researchers and scholars thought that the "global village" would be an imposition of cultures and customs from the world's most powerful countries, aiming at economic and political domination.

Adorno developed the concept of cultural industries to counter the notions of "mass culture" and "popular culture," which conveyed the idea that "the masses" and "people" were the creators of cultural goods consumed.

The Wealth of Networks

Until the 1970s, the world economy continued to rely on technologies based on oil, electricity, electronics, and the chemical industry. Since then, a new round of innovations has emerged, known as the techno-scientific revolution.

However, the core of the techno revolution is computer science, namely the interweaving of the computer industry and software with telecommunications. The extraordinary advances in the techniques of storage and processing of information were potentiated by digital networks.

This techno era is characterized by the dominance of finance and the transfer of capital and information through high-tech communication networks. These networks exhibit material aspects, such as computers, fiber optics, and communications satellites, but their content is immaterial.