There are two standard ways of understanding technology. One is that it's the essentially human activity. Monkeys use sticks and bees build nests, but humans take tool-making to an unprecedented degree due to their clever brains, opposable thumbs, and upright posture. Various intellectual revolutions have taken humans farther and farther from their natural state.
Another way of understanding technology is as applied science. Wikipedia says technology is "the making, usage, and knowledge of tools, machines, techniques, crafts, systems or methods of organization in order to solve a problem or perform a specific function." While science can be pursued for its own sake and without a clear view of its potential application, technology is the use of knowledge for specified ends.
There are a few problems with these definitions. For example, if technology is just part of what we are, then why do people often rail against technology, as happened in the industrial revolution, or after Hiroshima, or in today's world of hyper-connectedness? If you say technology is "natural" or "human", then it's hard to explain why some technology is good and some technology is bad.
Similarly, if technology is just problem-solving, then why does it have so many unforeseen effects? It often seems that new technologies create as many problems as they solve. In The Social Network, Sean Parker says they can't monetize Facebook because they don't even know what it is yet. Technologies as simple as email have changed they way we live--they don't just scratch an itch.
In a characteristically gerund-filled essay, The Question Concerning Technology (1954), Martin Heidegger tries to overcome these obstacles and get at the essence of technology. First, he distinguishes between the production of technological artifacts and the way of relating to things that makes their production possible. It is only when humans treat things (e.g., the sun, information, and even other humans) as means to an end that we can create technological solutions. For example, when a river is understood as a means to an end, it can be dammed to produce power. It can be understood in other ways, (e.g., a thing of beauty, a shape, a manifestation of God, etc.), but such thinking doesn't help solve problems and is thus not technological. Heidegger argues that technology, or technological means-ends thinking, is what makes modern science possible, not the other way around.
Neither science nor technology are necessarily bad things, but it's easy to take means-ends thinking as the only appropriate way of relating to the world around us. Today, as Heidegger points out, it's hard to take seriously Aristotle's four causes (material, teleological, formal, and efficient), since we are so used to thinking in terms of efficient or means-ends causality. On this model, we think we can predict the future with exactitude (given enough information, all things being equal, etc.), and even God becomes merely a watchmaker who set off the chain of causes that is the universe.
So if technology isn't a set of gadgets or the things people do to make those gadgets, if it's a way thinking that often occludes other ways of thinking, what then? It's worth noting that this definition solves the problems with the other conceptions of technology defined above, since technology is not just something humans do--it's one of many relationships we can have with other people and things. We might be able to judge the new possibilities technology makes possible, but not technology as such.
Most importantly, Heidegger's understanding of technology as means-ends thinking points to the need for other ways of thinking--aesthetic, cultural, social, ecological, religious, political, ethical, philosophical, kinesthetic, you name it. I'm often turned off by tech news, because it reinforces the culture of buying the latest disposable gadget instead of the development of truly important solutions. Rather than fleeing from technology as some Luddites do, we need to imbue technology with the real world technologists often ignore. I like my smartphone, but it's a far cry from the future envisioned by the prognosticators of the 1950's.
Links:
-Heidegger's essay in a more-or-less readable format
-Herbert Marcuse's essay on the political ramifications of ubiquitous means-ends thinking
