In my doctoral seminar last Monday, I started class as I always do – with a “This Day in History” moment. Essentially Nicole Oster and I spend a bit of time digging through that date’s Wikipedia page finding interesting nuggets that connect with topics we are discussing in the course. Since the course is a transdisciplinary seminar for first-year doctoral students in the Learning, Literacies, and Technology PhD program—there are a lot of things that pop out and make for some interesting conversation. I love the serendipity of it, since the date is effectively random. What always amazes me is how these random historical moments often reveal deeper patterns in how technology and society evolve.

My last class was on Monday, November 18 and perusing through Wikipedia I learned that it was this date in 1883 that the United States adopted standardized time zones. Not a big deal on the surface. But dig deeper into history… and you find that it was.

This was an event that would fundamentally transform how humans experience time—not just in the US but across the world. This wasn’t just about trains, though they played a starring role. It was the convergence of multiple technologies – the railroad’s need for coordinated schedules, the telegraph’s instant communication across vast distances, and precise mechanical clocks – that made this transformation both necessary and possible. Indeed, just one year later, in 1884, this American innovation led to the establishment of Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) as the global standard—a system we still use to coordinate time across the world today.  

What fascinates me is how these separate technological innovations – each revolutionary in its own right – combined to create something even more profound: a complete reconceptualization of time itself. From being a local, flexible experience tied to the sun’s position in each town, time became universal, standardized, and rigid.

And now I eat not when I am hungry, but because it is the right time to do so!

This got me thinking about how technologies shape not just what we do, but how we think and understand our world.

In a recent paper (To thine own mind be true), Nicole Oster, Danah Henriksen and I explored the idea of “cultural technologies” as a way of thinking about technology and its impact on us. And in this blog post I want to just push my thinking a bit further – just building on that serendipity of class falling on November 18!

This is part of a larger discussion I have been having about the nature of technology itself and how different technologies affect us in fundamentally different ways. So here is the question that sort of drives this investigation:

How is a hammer different from a television set? A website from a car?

While all are human inventions, some technologies simply help us accomplish physical tasks, while others fundamentally reshape how we think, communicate, and understand the world around us.

We typically think of technologies in two ways: as tools that help us accomplish specific tasks (like hammers or calculators) or as media that transmit messages and information (like television or newspapers).

Incidentally, I have always been bothered by the phrase “this is just a tool.” You will hear it quite often about AI (or whatever the latest technology being discussed). As someone (I don’t remember who) once said, the word “just” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Moreover, the tool/media distinction misses something crucial about certain technologies that do more than just extend our physical capabilities or communicate content.

This is where the concept of cultural technologies becomes valuable. These are technologies that fundamentally reshape our cognitive and social architecture in ways that often become invisible to us. Like fish unaware of water, we stop noticing their effects even as they profoundly alter how we think, create, and make meaning in the world.

Consider again the story of standardized time. The railroad, the telegraph, and the mechanical clock each began as tools, but their intersection created something far more profound. The need to coordinate train schedules across distances led to standardized time zones, fundamentally transforming how humans conceptualize and experience time itself. This wasn’t just about making trains run on time – it reshaped human consciousness, creating new concepts of punctuality, new forms of social coordination, and new ways of thinking about time as something that could be wasted or saved.

In contrast to tools, media primarily transmit content – they are channels through which information and messages flow. Think of television programs, newspaper articles, or radio shows. The focus is on the content being conveyed, though McLuhan, Postman and others would rightfully point out that the medium shapes the message and in turn changes society as well.

Cultural technologies, in contrast, don’t just help us complete tasks (like a hammer or an excel spreadsheet), or transmit information (like print or television)—they fundamentally alter how we think, create, and make meaning. They change our cognitive architecture and social practices.

The line between these categories often blurs. Television began as a medium for entertainment but evolved into a cultural technology that reshaped family life, political discourse, and social rituals. Social media started as platforms for sharing content but became cultural technologies that transformed how we form and maintain relationships.

The car offers another powerful example of how technologies can operate at different levels. At its most basic, it’s a tool for transportation – getting from point A to point B more efficiently. But when we look at its deeper impacts, the car emerges as a cultural technology that profoundly reshaped human geography, social relationships, and even concepts of freedom and identity. It enabled suburbanization, which changed not just where we live but how we live – creating new patterns of family life, consumption, and community. Through practices like redlining, it became entangled with systems of racial and economic segregation, literally reshaping the physical and social landscape of cities, further strengthening and helping maintain existing social and economic disparities. And today, this cultural technology threatens our very existence through its impact on our climate.

What makes something a cultural technology emerges from the interaction between its fundamental characteristics and human nature – both individual and collective. The car’s essential qualities—its speed, privacy, mobility, cost—create specific possibilities and constraints. But how these play out depends on their intersection with human psychology (our desire for autonomy, our status-seeking behavior), cognitive biases (our tendency to value immediate convenience over long-term costs), and broader societal structures (economic systems, racial hierarchies, urban planning paradigms).

Thus, the impact of a technology is not inherent in the technology itself—though its ‘true nature’ does matter, greatly. Rather, it emerges through a transaction between the technology and us, both as individuals and as a society.

The key distinction lies in depth of impact. While all technologies can influence culture, cultural technologies fundamentally reshape our cognitive and social architecture in ways that often become invisible to us. It’s not just what they do, but how deeply they become woven into the fabric of human thought and social interaction. So perhaps the better question isn’t “Is this a medium or a cultural technology?” but rather “How deeply does this technology reshape our fundamental ways of thinking and being in the world?”

In a follow-up post, I will explore what this means for our AI-saturated world.

For now, I will just say how cool it is that all this started with a random Wikipedia dive! Though I suppose I should say it started exactly at 1:07 PM Mountain Time on Sunday the 17th of November, as I was preparing for class.