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Abstract

EDITORIALThe rapid growth of scientific and technological knowledge witnessed since the 18 th Century, and especially in this century, has generated great changes for Nursing, care, and health care in society. Technology and science have become developed to a level that affects each facet of our sensibilities and experience. Even with this rapid growth of science and technology, innumerous challenges confront us, particularly those associated with prejudices which have adapted quickly to changes in the social arena, abuses against people, the new division of classes, and poverty, for society as a whole has always been fascinated with technological advance.Technology relates itself with the arts of care with specific implementations in the different contexts of the practice and with knowledge and/or a group's activity. However, technology is more than the sum of things and/or objects which we utilize in health care. It represents characteristics which include the development of abilities, knowledge, and incorporation of social arrangements and values.1 Thus, as in society in general, the nurses and remaining health care professionals understand that technology is welcome and offer incentive to its development. However, its beliefs towards the efficiency of technology have not yet been interpreted as much in what refers to the context of health care and nursing practice, as much as in the development of a historical conscience of the influence of technology, as well as even in the comprehension of the meaning of the emergence of technology.Aware of this scenario, the Post-Graduate Program at the Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brazil has dynamically and permanently sought specific disciplines and discussions through research and scientific and technological production among partners and research groups to support technological conscience in the sense that it is configured in process development, analysis of results, and concrete social contributions.Understanding the influence and the meaning of technology has an extraordinary importance, especially as it influences Nursing and health care and teaching, as well as it has implications in order to interpret history, the contemporary practice and future of health, for it also orients a political agenda and new roles and responsibilities.2 In this manner, technology needs to be understood as a dependant of its context, in that objects have become technological, components of technology, not only by virtue of how they are defined and classified, but also by virtue of how they are used. In other words, what is their function of use, what is their influence upon our actions, conceptions, and social contexts.