Technology is the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes, or machinery and equipment developed from the application of scientific knowledge (Oxford Dictionary). Technique is a way of carrying out a particular task, or a skillful or efficient way of doing or achieving something.

As in “Propaganda is a scientific technique that is used to influence public opinion.”

In our technological society, technique is the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity.

 Jacques Ellul

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Ellul distills the essential characteristics of technique to a list of seven. The two most obvious ones, he says, have been addressed so often by other scholars that he can set them aside: rationality (for example, systematization and standardization) and artificiality (subjugation and often the destruction of nature). The other five characteristics of technique are less widely discussed. They are automatism, which is the process of technical means asserting themselves according to mathematical standards of efficiency; self-augmentation, the process of technical advances multiplying at a growing rate and building on each other, while the number of technicians also increases; wholeness, the feature of all individual techniques and their various uses sharing a common essence; universalism, the fact that technique and technicians are spreading worldwide; and autonomy, the phenomenon of technique as a closed system, “a reality in itself … with its special laws and its own determinations.”

Matlack, S. (2014). Confronting the Technological Society: On Jacques Ellul’s classic analysis of technique. The New Atlantis. [Online]