“What does technology tell us about society?” asked Matt Asay last August, in an effort to explain what our decision to use (or avoid) tools like Twitter or Facebook says about our society.

Technology both reflects and influences the values and culture of the society that produced it to the point that, historically, eras have been identified by their dominant technology - Stone Age, Iron Age, Bronze Age, Industrial Age, and today’s Information Age. And, while enriching daily experience, today’s instant interaction has created a paradigm shift in the way we do business and live our lives.

The world isn’t actually getting smaller; it just seems that way. The invention of the automobile meant that people no longer needed to work or go to school in the same town they lived in. As air travel became more prevalent, it was possible to visit other countries without having to emigrate there. Better sanitation and medicine promised longer life and better circumstances. In the Bronze Age, life expectancy averaged 18 years. During the 20th century the average lifespan in the United States increased by more than 30 years (to 78+), of which 25 years can be attributed to advances in public health.

The proliferation of the computer has shrunk the world even further. You can visit some of the world’s top museums and get a better view of the art than you could wandering through the galleries. And technology has changed the way we think about pictures in general. From the early, unsmiling tintypes recording social mores - betrothal pictures, portraits of the dead - it’s now possible (and perhaps regrettably prevalent) to publish pictures of our kid’s first tooth worldwide on a social network site.

I think that Twitter translates our society’s current desire to share and discover what’s happening right now, anywhere in the world, in 140-character sound bytes. Facebook is a social network that reflects our cozy desire to share news and photos instantly with a huge number of “friends” all over the world. (A January 2009 Compete.com study has ranked Facebook as the most used social network by worldwide monthly active users.)

What does that really mean?

Matt’s question reflects only half the reality. Perhaps it’s better to ask if technology is influenced by the evolution of society or if society is influenced by the evolution of technology. It’s not a chicken-or-the-egg question, but there is a piece missing and that is, what links society and technology? The answer is…the use we make of it.

The Information Age has generated a phenomenon known as IT consumerism, broadly defined by Jon Stokes as “the general move of consumer-level products and technologies into the enterprise.” In the course of 30 years, ENIAC, the “Giant Brain” introduced in 1946, morphed into the ubiquitous PC present in any geek’s toolkit. As it became more user friendly and, consequently, more popular, it moved into major companies as the tool of choice. Today, it’s a sad reality that, for the most part, a user’s home system is several iterations ahead of what’s in general use at the office.

I feel strongly that society shapes technology as much as technology shapes society. To continue Matt’s premise, look at Twitter. Twitter isn’t technologically revolutionary. All of the pieces existed previously. However, it has infiltrated and subtly changed our society. Where previously letters were sent to announce important milestones (child birth; graduation; marriage; death), the new world of micro-blogging assumes that people actually care what we had for breakfast or that we’re watching TV. The same is true of Facebook, although it permits extended verbosity on the trivial minutia of daily life.

Take a look at the telephone. At first it was advertised as an improvement on the telegraph - better for transmitting urgent messages and ordering groceries. Although Alexander Graham Bell predicted the social use of the telephone, it wasn’t until the 1930s that AT&T advertised “Reach out and touch someone.” Today we can do it in 140 characters.

As John Lienhard, Professor Emeritus of Mechanical Engineering and History at the University of Houston, put it: “Our machines teach us. But they take their time evolving a role in our lives. Commercial software has been changing us year after year ever since it burst on the scene around 1980, and we’re still being changed by it. We can’t begin to see where the Internet is taking us. So it’s small wonder that the telephone took fifty years to show us how it would alter the very fabric of everyday life.”

And why did Michelin launch its Red Guide and maps? To sell tires. If people travelled more by car, they’d wear out their tires and buy new ones. The guides became extraordinarily popular in their own right and today there is no connection between how they’re used and the thought process behind their conception.

There is nothing unique or inevitable about the social changes brought about by technology. New technologies must meet consumer needs or fail, and these may involve intangible human elements like desire, imagination, or sometimes chance. The electric car is hovering on the brink. Today it doesn’t meet the commute needs of most people. It remains to be seen whether it will become the vehicle of the future, or go the way of the amphibious car (which, incidentally, I thought was an excellent idea).

To conclude, I’ll add that open source is the perfect symbol of this “use revolution” - not technological revolution as a goal in itself (of course, if we can contribute, we won’t hesitate!), but presenting innovative ways of distributing products, proving that a free model can thrive. The free model emerged in reaction to traditional software that, for a number of reasons, failed to satisfy clients. And this reaction does not need to be supported by a brand new technology but yes, by a brand new way of doing things, new things with new or old technologies.

Bertrand