AI & Soc (1996) 10:226-232

9 1996 Springer-Verlag London Limited AI & SOCIETY

Cognitive Technology - Technological Cognition 1

Jacob L. Mey
Institute of Language and Communication, Odense University, Denmark

Abstract:Technology, in order to be human, needs to be informed by a reflection on what it

is to be a tool in ways appropriate to humans. This involves both an instrumental, appropriating
aspect ('I use this tool') and a limiting, appropriated one ('The tool uses me').
Cognitive Technology focuses on the ways the computer tool is used, and uses us. Using
the tool on the world changes the way we think about the world, and the way the world
appears to us: as an example, a simple technology (the leaf blower) and its effects on the
human are discussed.

Keywords: Technology; Cognition; Computers; Language; Pragmatics; Mind and Brain;

Tool; Leaf-blower

Technology, in a very broad sense, has to do with the desire and need of people to
externalize themselves (Gorayska and Mey, 1996).
The human essence obtains the birthright of existence only by externalizing itself
in its products, that is, the various ways and means that people have devised to deal
with their environment, the world. The c o m m o n denominator for this externalizing
activity, this going out of oneself, is to become 'another'; that is to say, to alienate
oneself in order to become a true human self.
One of the main ways in which this alienation happens is by the creation of tools.
Tools can be many things, from the simple stone that a Neanderthaler picks up to
batter his rival over the head, to the extremely sophisticated machinery that modern
humans surround themselves with.
C o m m o n for all tools is that they are both necessary and insufficient. That is to
say, they contain always two dimensions, along one of which we realize ourselves
in alienation, while along the other we lose ourselves in the otherness of the world,
we b e c o m e 'alienated', in a popular parlance that used to go the rounds in the
'sixties and 'seventies.

1Closing address at the First International Cognitive Technology Conference, Hong Kong, 24-29 August
1995.
Cognitive Technology - Technological Cognition 227

Consider the following passage from Virginia Woolf:

"Let us consider letters - how they come at breakfast, and at night, with their yellow stamps and their
green stamps, immortalized by the postmark - for to see one's own envelope on another's table is to
realize how soon deeds sever and become alien.
Then at last the power of the mind to quit the body is manifest, and perhaps we fear or hate or wish
annihilated this phantom of ourselves, lying on the table . . . . Ah, but when the post knocks and the letter
comes always the miracle seems repeated - speech attempted. Venerable are letters, infinitely brave,
forlorn, and lost.

Life would split asunder without them (Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room. Harvest ed. p. 92-93)

I think this quote shows the double dimension of alienation, in particular of

technological 'otherness', in an admirable way. Letters are a kind of tool: we use
them to communicate with other people, enter their otherness, so to speak, as well as
to communicate our inner selves to the outer world. In doing so, we 'sever our
deeds', such that they become alien, like our own letter we imagine lying on the
breakfast table. The 'speech' that we 'attempt' in our letters is, in a way, always
'forlorn', doomed to remain outside ourselves, like a limb that is cut off; yet, it is
the only way we have to enter the communion of human beings, 'losing our souls in
order to gain them' (Matthew 16:25).
Of course, in the process of gaining ourselves, of 'saving our souls', we prefigure
the final separation of the mind and the body, the eternal 'S.O.S.' that humans
incessantly emit during their entire lifetimes. This final dilemma is not one that we
can solve: for how could we live with a 'final solution' that only is final in the sense
that it ends not just the problems, but even all the solutions?
If cognitive technology is that by which we create our cognitive tools, that by
which we go 'out of our minds' to imprint ourselves into othernesses, then we must
try to bridge the gap that technology creates, by focusing on the technology from a
human point of view. To do that, we must deliver our 'limbs' to be 'severed' on the
operating table, just as we place our letters on the chest of drawers in the hallway to
be opened and read. But there must also be a counterpart to this analyzing and
severing, to this opening up, viz., a human activity by which we put the severed
limbs together again; not only open, but read, understand, and absorb the letters we
have written to ourselves. Dealing with technology is then not just a matter of
understanding it, analyzing .it from its technical outside in: we must understand the
technology from its human inside out, so to speak. (Gorayska and Mey, 1996).
Let' s consider a concrete example of how technology affects the mind. I will talk
about a rather pedestrian form of technology, one that many of us are at least passively
familiar with: the leaf blower. For those who are not acquainted with this masterpiece
of technological innovation, a leaf blower is simply a piece of tube with a power
blower at one end; the air stream that is generated can be directed by pointing the
one end of the tube at the stuff I want to move: leaves, twigs, loose gravel and sand,
and all sorts of garden related detritus. Basically, what the leaf blower does is what
the broom used to do, except that the moving force no longer is the human muscle
but an air stream generated by a technological gadget, a fan joined to a gasoline
powered motor.
In our suburban society, leaf blowers are the object of much controversy, mainly
because they make so much noise. On any normal Saturday or Sunday, their monoton-
ous drone is always present, and most of the time rather annoying, especially when
228 J.L. Mey

you have perfectionist neighbours who want their driveways to resemble their living
room floors after the wives have been there with the vacuum cleaner. But since you
are probably the proud owner of such a wondrous instrument yourself, you put up
with it, and inflict the same punishment on your neighbours when your time comes
to clean the porch, the driveway, the sidewalks, and of course the precious lawn.
From the point of view of the result obtained, the leaf blower is certainly a more
effective instrument than its predecessor, the broom. The dirt gets removed more
quickly, more efficiently, and more explicitly: you certainly are letting the surrounding
humanity know that you are busy doing your garden chores. On the negative side we
have, of course, the infernal noise (people should wear hearing protection while
operating this instrument, just like the ground traffic controllers in an airport).
But there is another effect which is truly 'mind-blowing', if you will excuse the
pun: we start thinking differently about the operation itself of yard-cleaning, which
the new tool allows us to carry out in a novel way. And it is here that technology has
its true impact on the mind: it affects our mental attitude towards ourselves and our
environment. As Gavriel Salomon has remarked (in another, educationally-oriented
setting - he is commenting on the well-publicized but rather disappointing results of
training programs such as LOGO), "working with tools does not teach much in and
of itself. It is the thinking that accompanies [tool]-afforded activities that may have
an impact." (1992:13)
Which is precisely the point here. While technology changes the world, in that it
allows us to perform certain, familiar operations in another, novel way, the effects
of this change operate on us, in their turn, and change our way of thinking about the
world; in this particular case about garden rubbish and how to remove it, and why -
not to speak of the 'where to' problem, the old question already raised by Jfin
Neruda trying to dispose of a straw mattress in nineteenth-century cholera-ridden
Prague (1853).
Leaf blowing is usually a typical case of sweeping things under the rug, if one
can say that: you don't pick up the small heaps of dirt that your blower has created,
but you try to blow them out of sight, if not out of existence (your existence)
altogether, over to the neighbours' or the city's sphere of responsibility. What earlier
was an object of collection upon removal, is now just an object of removal. We
think about garden rubbish in a different way.
Consequently upon this thinking, another innovative thought process is taking
place: we start to see the entire operation of garden upkeep in a different manner.
Whereas we earlier might have tolerated a certain level of unorderliness (say, a
certain number of leaves on the grass would be permitted, since it would be near-
impossible to get them all out, using a hand-held rake or a broom), the leaf blower
forces us to think of a garden lawn as a living room carpet on which even the tiniest
white thread is a thorn in the eye and the possible igniting fuse of violent, domestic
dispute. 'I gave you this vacuum cleaner, so why don't you use it properly?', a
model husband would feel entitled to say. Similarly, the consensus of the
neighbourhood is that a man who doesn't know how to wield a leaf-blower to create
that spotless lawn is a blemish on the environment, a blot on the streetscape.
To illustrate this, let me recount a personal anecdote.
In the early morning hours of August 13, 1995, a Sunday, I saw a man at Caddo
Lake State Park, in a place called Uncertain, Texas, use a blower to clean Park Road
Cognitive Technology- TechnologicalCognition 229

#2, which is the road that connects the park to Texas 2315, and on to the campsites
and cabins. This road goes nowhere; it is strictly a 'park road', that is, it is wholly
within the confines of a nature reservation where you, among other things, cannot
carry a loaded firearm, display alcohol or pornography, and so on.
The one fact that struck me immediately was the bizarreness of this person cleating
a road, going through the woods, of all woodsy remnants such as leaves, twigs,
sand, branches and other natural debris that might have collected during the night
(or maybe week, if this was a typical Sunday morning operation).
One used to make fun of the Dutch for 'washing the streets', referring to their
custom of cleaning their porches, the so-called 'stoops', with buckets of water, pails
and brooms, every Saturday. The picture of maids in bonnets bending over the blue
sandstone that was the favorite material for these structures, and scrubbing to their
masters' hearts' delight is one of my earliest childhood memories. That work seemed
to me, even at that time, to be a hard to rationalize use of human labor ('nigger'
labor, as we were wont to say). Now why was this park employee (and he wasn't
even black) seemingly happily doing this kind of slave work; and even more
poignantly, why was he in such an absurd way trying to clean the forest of leaves
and branches?
Naturally, the man was not doing all this on his own instigation; he was a park
employee having been given orders to do precisely that. But suppose the park
authorities had given this same man an old fashioned broom and dustpan, to perform
what was exactly the same chore: cleaning a forest road for traces of nature. He
probably would have balked at this assignment, and said that, in the old days, they
would call this nigger work, and he wasn't going to do it. What's more, he would
probably not have been able to see the point of doing it at all.
That point, finally, is relative to the instrument he was supposed to use, a blower
instead of a broom, and can be formulated as follows: the nature of his tool changed
his outlook on the labor to be performed. What had been classified as slave labor,
now became ennobled because of the blower. The leaf-blower changed the mind of
the worker, so that while earlier, he would have had nothing to do with the business
if he wanted to keep his self-respect, now, with the help of the blower, he was happy
to perform this absolutely idiotic task with a good conscience, and perhaps, God
knows, even with pride.
Technology as such is unspecific as to its aims, and it has no roots in society.
Technology as such is not plagued by associations of slave labor; no ghosts of
housewife chores are left to deal with. By contrast, real 'human' labor is always
anchored in some specific tradition, and as such is part of a societal whole (whether
one likes it or not) - as in the case of my Norwegian neighbour, who once remarked,
when he saw me hang up clothes after a bout of laundering: ' W o m e n ' s work'. Had I
had an automatic clothes distributor and -suspender, he probably would have admired
my technological innovative prowess.
To sum up what we have been discussing so far:
While technology and its applications change the world, its effects on the world
change the mind, but do this on the rebound, so to speak. We should, therefore,
properly distinguish between these two kinds of effects as being of different orders:
the first order representing the effects of technology on the world, the second order of
technological innovation comprising the (indirect) effects of these changes on the mind.
230 J.L. Mey

Borrowing Herbert Simon's (1982) famous car example, I want to distinguish

between the mere introduction of the automobile as a technological device (the
horseless carriage' replacing the horse-driven vehicle) 1 and the adoption of the
car as the device that allows us to 'Discover America: Best By Car' (as a US Mail
stamped slogan had it in the 'sixties), or our second home-on-wheels, or a place of
making out when you are a teenager, or an instrument of defining yourself in the
eyes of your colleagues and neighbours, or even a spare bedroom on four wheels, as
Salomon (1992) has put it.
This second order of effects is where the technology defines us, such that driving
an old car around a posh neighbourhood may result in your being pulled over and
questioned by the police (as happened to me once in Larchmont, N.Y.); parking
your blue Ford Torino 1976 station wagon on the nice street in Evanston, Ill. where
you happen to have lived on and off for three years or so, will sooner or later result
in the police sticking one of those red notices on your window telling you to remove
your jalopy within 7 days, or else...
Thus, not only is one man's pride his neighbour's eyesore: if beauty is in the eye
of the beholder, then technology is, in a strict sense of the word, in the mind of the
user. It is those mind effects of technology that are of the greatest interest to us in
connection with cognition. We turn therefore now to the intricate question of the
cognitive tool and what it does to the mind.
What defines a cognitive tool, as opposed to other tools? And how does the
cognitive tool specifically influence our thinking? These are the two questions that
circumscribe the domains of cognitive technology, and technological cognition
respectively (on these terms, see Gorayska and Mey, 1996; Gorayska and Marsh,
1996). The specificity of the cognitive tool, as opposed to, say, a hammer or a car, is
that it directly affects, and operates upon, the workings of our mind. In general,
purely reproductive tools have little cognitive interest: a Xerox copier is not by
itself a cognitive tool (in the normal case, and barring certain imaginative uses),
while the typewriter, inasmuch as it interacts with our mind in forming our thoughts
on paper, is a cognitive tool (albeit a primitive one, compared to a computer).
Of course, the distinction between cognitive and non-cognitive tools is by no
means a watertight one. I could easily imagine some cognitive effects arising from,
say, using an ax to clear virgin forest; after all, every tool is an expression of the
human mind in the surrounding material world, as we saw earlier. But the cognitive
tool is specialized for mental functions, as one sees easiest by contemplating the
tool for thought by excellence, the human wetware a.k.a, as the brain.
I must emphasize that the brain by itself wouldn't be anything but a complicated,
rather uninteresting collection of cells and intricate wiring. It is by using the brain in
a cognitive activity that the effects of its typical mode of operation become apparent.
Which is when we can start speaking of the influence that the activities of the brain
as a cognitive tool have on our cognitive activity, on our thinking.
Here, too, the limitations of the analogy (so popular in our days) between the
brain and a computer become clear. As a tool for cognition, the brain 'is' a kind of
computer; but it is through its cognitive use that it becomes a true carrier of human

1Actually still the name of a small automotive business in Thrall, Texas (45 miles out of Austin on US
79): 'The Horseless Carriage Company'.
Cognitive Technology- Technological Cognition 231

cognitive technology. And vice versa, this use spawns a cognition which is no longer
'general purpose', indiscriminate as to origin and effects, but is a specifically
technological one: one that is geared to, and dependent on, the particular tools that
the human brain has produced. Brains are always custom-made: but the customizing
is not done by some computer company, or even God Himself as the super computer
software creator and systems support person. The brain' s customized design depends
entirely on what we, as users, do with it and how we choose to weight and assign its
essential functions.
Incidentally, as to the computer itself, the analogy operates in the same fashion.
The computer is also what we make it: its functions arise not out of the software
alone, but through the feedback effects of software (and hardware, of course) on the
user.
Cognitive technology thus turns necessarily (although not automatically) into
technological cognition (Gorayska and Marsh, 1996). I said: 'not automatically',
because the necessity is one that we need to realize and make our own. The conditions
for using technology are not in the technology alone, but in the minds of the users.
To vary Kant' s famous dictum, cognition without technology is empty, but technology
without cognition is dangerous and blind. Our minds need the computer as a tool,
but we need to consciously integrate the computer into our minds before we start
using it on a grand scale. In this way (and in this way only), rather than being a
mindless technological contraption, the computer may become a true tool of the
mind.
Technology creates gadgets that can be put to use without regard for their essential
functions. What, in the end, such gadgets do to ourselves and to our environment,
however, is not necessarily anybody's concern in their actual conditions of use, in
which the mind-captivating (not to say mind-boggling) fascination of advanced
technology allows us to focus on the intermediate stage between intent and effect,
the purely technological one.
To take a simple example, pressing a button is, in itself, a neutral activity; yet it
can in the end cause a door bell to ring just as well as it may detonate a nuclear
explosion. 'I just pressed a button', the pilot who launched Fat Boy on Hiroshima
could have said. And if Timothy McVeigh (one of the three persons indicted in the
1995 Oklahoma City bombing of the Federal Building that took 165 lives) would
have had to kill all those 165 people by hand, he never would have gotten beyond
the first two or three, especially if he had started out with the babies. Now he could
just connect some wires, and leave it at that. Technology does the work; our minds
are at rest.
Garrison Keillor, in his program Lake Wobegone, 12 August 1995, offered a
philosophical reflection on Halloween pranks. His point was that you are responsible
even for the unknown, and unintended, effects of the fun you have (the example was
of some boys at Halloween disconnecting a box car and sending it out on the tracks).
What determines your responsibility is the outcome; he called this a strictly 'outcome-
based morality'.
Applying this to our subject from a slightly different point of view, one could
talk of a pragmatic view of technology and cognition. The pragmatics of cognitive
technology (CT) deals with technology's effects on the users and their environment;
a pragmatic view of technological cognition (TC) implies that we inquire into the
232 J.L. Mey

conditions that determine that cognition, that is the conditions under which users
can cognize their technology, in order to realize the effects of their technological
efforts.
W e need pragmatics in our CT so that it can be e n v i r o n m e n t a l l y correct; we need
pragmatics for our TC to be morally sound.

References

Gorayska, B. and Marsh, J. (1996). EpistemicTechnologyand RelevanceAnalysis: RethinkingCognitive

Technology. In Gorayska and Mey (eds.) Cognitive Technology: In search of a humane inter]ace.
Amsterdam/New York: North Holland/Elsevier.(Advances in Psychology, 113)
Gorayska, B. and Mey, J. L. (1996). Of Minds and Men. In Gorayskaand Mey (eds.) Cognitive Technology:
In search of a humane interface. Amsterdam/New York: North Holland/Elsevier. (Advances in
Psychology, 113)
Neruda, J., (1854). Kam s nfm? Prague: Melantrich. ['How to get rid of it?']
Salomon, G. (1992). Computers' first decade: Golem, Camelot, or the Promised Land? Invited talk at the
AERA Meeting, April 1992, San Francisco. (Draft MS)
Simon, H. (1982). The sciences of the artificial. Cambridge,Mass.: MIT Press.

Correspondence and offprint requests to: Jacob L. Mey, Institute of Languageand Communication,Odense
University,DK 5230 Odense M, Denmark.E-mail:jam@language.ou.dk