This book is an essay about the character of technology. It tries to argue two points:

-Technology as a fundamental human activity is intimately related to all other human activities and thus is an integral, indispensable part of all human culture and is not, as one often hears, an alien, inhuman force unleashed upon mankind by some external agent.

- The interactive relationship between technology and all the other manifestations of human life and culture can be proven, even interactions as intractable and elusive as that between the political, social, economic, or religious ideas dominant in a given society and contemporary preferences and designs of technological hardware.