Abstract

In the West, tech devices are valued not only for their usefulness in daily life, but also and perhaps mostly for their symbolic fallout, and for the illusions they offer, with heavy consequences on the level of experience: while technology is user friendly and makes the world close at hand for us, everything is much more complicated when we are confronted with life, and we feel inadequate. If we consider other populations though, and ask ourselves what traditional societies have to teach us, we can see that technology is not a mere pastime for them, and it doesn’t have a representative value; it can just be useful for everyday necessities and for the organization of society.