“Facebook ready for biggest ever technology float”, the Guardian tells me this morning. But Facebook is not a technology: it is a social medium. If people get together in a social grouping, say, a book club or the freemasons or a political party, you wouldn’t call that a technology. Sure, cars and phones and roads and houses are necessary for people to get together but you don’t call these social groupings or the enabling of them technology or infrastructure.

I once thought that everyone understood the division in computing between hardware and software. The whole point of the computer is that it is a universal machine: it can be programmed to do things the hardware designer never thought of. Facebook is a software phenomenon, not a piece of technology. In the early days of the Syrian uprising a British/Syrian activist told Newsnight that the police rounding up demonstrators were asking: “where's your Facebook machine”, thinking it was a device.

Treating Facebook shares as a technology stock is only the latest and most prominent example of this confusion. For decades people who don't like using computers have been calling themselves “technologically challenged”. But negotiating a computer isn’t getting dirty under a car: it means following logical operations. You wouldn’t call looking up items in a book index “technology”, neither is poking someone on Facebook.

Biomimetic architecture has been making waves for some time. The latest stunning addition to the ranks is the One Ocean Pavilion at EXPO 2012 in Yeosu, South Korea, designed by the Austrian architects Soma. The pavilion is a homage to the ocean and marine life and its most dramatic feature is the gill-like array along the facade. These are flexible elements that buckle under compression to create the gill-effect. They are not merely decorative: they open or close to regulate both ventilation and light. The buckling mechanism is a classic out of the D’Arcy Thompson bioinspirational handbook. Forms created under such physical forces take up beautiful “graded forms” as D’Arcy Thompson called them. As the degree of flexure varies along the facade a pleasing serried cascade effect is achieved. I guess the facade could do a Mexican wave if you so programmed it. The pavilion opens today if you’re in striking distance of it.

Yesterday to the V&A for British Design 1948-2012. A terrific show that highlights British creativity. Good to see the Mini, Concorde, the HST and all the expected treats but it’s the finds that make these exhibitions. Mine was the Falkirk Wheel, a wondrous piece of engineering that connects two canals, one 24 metres above the other. Yes, I should have known about it before because it’s been open for 10 years but we all have our blind spots. The Wheel is one of those inspired engineering solutions, beautiful, playful and practical.

But there is a twist. I was thrilled to see that the builders were the Butterley Company of Derbyshire. Butterley build the great roof at St Pancras station, recently restored to great acclaim. It was heartening to see that a company founded in 1790 and so much a part of our industrial heritage was still delivering state-of-the art engineering in the 21 century.

Then I discovered that Butterley went bankrupt in 2009, a victim of the bankers’ folly. This is a cause for despair. Could not an important company like this have been nursed through the recession? Once gone, this sort of expertise will never return. Judging by our high streets, the nation’s response to tragedies like this seems to be: “Let them open nail parlours”.