We amplify the hazardous character of the concept by investing it with agency—by using the word technology as the subject of active verbs. Take, for example, a stock historical generalization such as: “the cotton-picking machine transformed the southern agricultural economy and set off the Great Migration of black farm workers to northern cities.” Here we tacitly invest a machine with the power to initiate change, as if it were capable of altering the course of events, of history itself. By treating these inanimate objects—machines—as causal agents, we divert attention from the human (especially socioeconomic and political) relations responsible for precipitating this social upheaval. Contemporary discourse, private and public, is filled with hackneyed vignettes of technologically activated social change— pithy accounts of “the direction technology is taking us” or “changing our lives.”
I see this as related to Frank Gavin's notion of Chronological Proportionality, which he describes in Five Ways To Use History Well: http://longnow.org/seminars/02010/jul/12/five-ways-use-history-well/
Misattributing chronological proportionality to tangible events is the danger of underestimating the complexity of information and impacts.
