defining technology

It occurs to me that it will be necessary that I develop a working definition for 'technology' if I intend to write or think extensively about it, and especially if I intend to make the case that ethereal things like race and gender ought to be classified as technologies.

Back in 2006, in my very first semester as a university student, I took a class called The History of Science and Society. Somehow, although I was interested in the class, I didn't realize at the time how profoundly that very idea - science and society - would affect my future studies and the very course of my life's work.

One of my first assignments in that class was to submit a definition of technology. At that early stage, before I had done much thinking on the matter, I submitted the following:

Technology is the body of knowledge that members of a society apply to their physical environment to meet their survival needs.

-- from Renzetti, Claire M., and Daniel H. Curran. Living Sociology. Needham Heights, MA: Allyn & Bacon, 1998.

Truly this is was a fairly good starting point considering how little I knew two years ago. Nevertheless, here I find myself still struggling to come up with a good, solid definition that will allow me to apply the term 'technology' to both material and socio-cultural innovations.

So far, I think I can say this:
Technology is the implementation of a method to manipulate the natural world to the advantage of humanity or in such a way as to further 'progress.' (Defining progress, of course, would be the stuff of another discussion entirely.)

While this may be a good beginning in that it allows for the expansion of 'technology' to go beyond material technologies, it does not succinctly and specifically convey my meaning that the term ought not be so narrowly defined as to only refer to physical manipulation of the environment. Alas, it does not readily convey the idea that the manipulation of the social environment (which is, after all, a part of the natural world since humans evolved as social creatures) is a form of technological advancement as well.

I must work on this. A good place to start doing this would be to draw comparisions between material and socio-cultural examples of human ingenuity, and I've got an entire career ahead of me to figure all this out.