Through humanity's history, the need to improve the quality of life and ensure the survival, lead to a vast ocean of different and important technological discoveries.

Language

One of the most important discoveries, that it's generally not usually perceived by the main public as a technology, it's language.

Language is the way that humans communicate between them in order to transmit information trough time. Nowadays, that information can be stored in different means, from physical to digital. For a long time it was registered as paints on caves and then later it was written on such materials like papyrus and paper.
Today is mostly registered as bits.

One interesting way that the Humans developed to share knowledge (information) through it's evolution was by proverbs, riddles, chants and other similar things... That information was passed by generations. Usually they were easier to memorize, shorter and kept a certain curiosity on the meaning or interpretation. There was a message behind, it acted as a vehicle. In those days, knowledge was directly related to the capacity of memorization.

One incredible example of this, comes from the Sanskrit language, also known as the mother of all languages.
There's a document called Rigveda, the oldest known Vedic Sanskrit text. Although it's not a small text (actually it's composed about 10 books, 10,552 mantras) it's believed that it was been orally transmitted from the 2nd millennium BCE and then later wrote down, although recent discoveries point out that it might be even older, around 4000 BCE ^[7] . Some of it's verses are still chanted today in the Hindu culture. ^[1] It's content is hard to translate into modern languages.
That's one of the problems with languages. It's usually dependent on a context. Concepts, perception and interpretation vary from culture to culture.

Documents

Documents can hide the truth.

Most of the history we know today comes from ancient documents and archaeological evidence. When these sources support each other, it validates the information as true, even if only temporarily.

"The knowledge resulting from literary data and preserved elements of material culture should be considered together not as the final explanation of the historical process, but as a complementary interpretative framework."
Marta Raczynska

But what happens when documents and archaeology don't exactly match?

In the northwest of the Iberian Peninsula, before it was invaded and colonized by the Romans, there were people living there, primarily in rock settlements locally known as "castros". These were generally situated in elevated locations for peripheral vision and strategic military advantage. They had their customs and traditions, yet when the Romans arrived, they were seen as barbarians.

After process of Romanization, the Romans described this area as Gallaecia, where the Gallaeci people lived.

There are documents describing the individual populations that compose the so called Gallaeci. These texts also describe them as originally having celtic roots. There are fewer Celtic artifacts found in the northwest of the peninsula compared to the south. Despite this, in the Spanish part of Gallaecia (mainly Galicia), the Celtic theory has gained so much attention that it is often accepted as absolute truth. They adopted many celtic traditions, mainly through nationalist movements that tried to impose the idea that their roots were celtic. Unlike the north of Portugal (also part of Gallaecia), this Celtic theory was never that strong, because the portuguese nationalist movements linked Portugal's heritage to a different group, called Lusitanos (Lusitanians, not located in Gallaecia, but Lusitania).

Interestingly, Portugal's origins started in the northern region, part of the territory of Gallaeci, which was later known as the Condado Portucalense before it became a kingdom.

The fact is that the "cultura castreja" (castro culture) seems to be shaped more by ancient texts than by archaeological findings. There were Celtic influences in the Iberian Peninsula, but the archaeological findings in the castros of Gallaecia point to a pre-celtic people. It's a topic that will be studied for a long time, illustrating how historical documents, even ancient ones, can lead to confusion.^[8][9]

Documents can show the truth.

There's also the opposite happening. Where we only known about something because it was documented, otherwise it would be lost "forever".

One good example of this, is located in the south of France, where in the 12th century there was a group of Christians called "Cathars". They didn't call themselves Cathars, but "bons hommes / bons femmes" (good men / good women). They practiced a Christian doctrine called "Catharism", though its origins and how it ended up in southern France in the 12th century remain a mystery.

This group of Christians was attacked during the Albigensian Crusade, as they were seen as heretics. Soon after the crusade, the Inquisition was established to combat all heresy.

However, when the crusaders (primarily from the north of what is now France) attacked the Cathars, they had difficulty distinguishing them from regular Christians. Then the Pope ordered the knights to kill everyone, saying that God would know how to tell them apart.

Today, when studying this topic, archaeologist would have a hard time finding "Cathar" ruins, because what distinguish the "Cathars", was something largely immaterial (religious or spiritual). They were against material possessions and the ruins of the settlements and castles they inhabited were typical for the region, making it harder to identify which belonged to them unless it was documented.

Here we have two examples of how information can shape the knowledge we have today and how important it is to separate truth from fiction.

Too much information

Nowadays the quantity of information is so huge that's unthinkable of transmitting it in as other civilizations used to do. Even the mean that used to prevail through the last thousand years, it's now becoming less and less used, the book.
Due to the excessive quantity of information available and much more efficient means of registering it, the ability to memorize those things started to decay.
However, no one expected such a giant impact that Internet allowed to.

"The information explosion is so profoundly larger than anyone ever thought."
Alberto Cairo

In 2010, in a Google press conference, they announced that it was being produced 5 exabytes (5 000 000 000 gigabytes) of information every two days. It's more than 200 000 years of video (DVD quality). ^[2]

One of the biggest challenges that society and the individual face, is how to manage and filter that extraordinary quantity of information. Technology helps that process, but it was also what created it by giving the possibility to each citizien to expose whatever he wants, whether or not it is true, whether or not you are interested.
That vast amount of information comes with a price. How can we efficiently filter what's truthful? Because there's a huge amount of misinformation out there, even scientific data.
That lead to the creation of Agnotology, which is the science field that studies culturally induced ignorance or doubt. ^[3]

“With every passing decade our culture becomes more dependent on information technology. To survive in such an environment, a person must become familiar with abstract symbolic languages.”
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Information anxiety

It's the difference between what we know and what we should know. Due the huge quantity of information and how fast is produced. The gap between what we know and should know is increasing a lot, which causes anxiety because it's very hard to accompany the rhythm of how much information is created.
We need to process it and then absorb it. That process takes time because it requires experience in order to be properly absorbed. While we're still in this learning process, new information is constantly being created. ^[4]

This concept also happens a lot when a person does not have enough knowledge to process something. There's a big difference between the type of information that a creator and a consumer have. The same goes for designing an object. If it lacks visual cues or other type of information that's supposed to help, it creates anxiety after several failed attempts of using the object.

A great example of this is how some musical genres are more 'accessible' than others. For a person that lacks music theory knowledge, it's way easier to process and create empathy to simple genres than complex ones. That's why Pop music is more popular than Classical music. In order to fully enjoy both genres you have to internalize and process the information, which means that less and simple information, it's easier to process. To truly enjoy Classical music, one needs to be much more knowledgeable according to the musical domain.
That doesn't mean that everything needs to be simplified.

There are complex and simple experiences that everyone can enjoy, but those require different languages to be expressed and processed.
If the creator does not have that in mind, then the person enjoying it might feel frustrated or anxious because it cannot fully understand it.