Technology is hard to understand, yes. Scary at times, yes. Powerful, yes. But I think it's unlikely that it will become a self-controlling monster that its creators have no power over. Every technology has developed in response to some need that someone sees. Trains, cars, the Internet, search engines, instant messengers all were invented to make life easier. They have all had unintended consequences, yes, but everything has unintended consequences. Everyone's heard the parable about the butterfly in China that flapped its wing and changed the weather in Europe. I've studied this a bit in another rhetoric class, and one fascinating thing I got insight on was hacking. People don't just hack to get money from a bank. People often hack into the computer chips on cars and make better vehicles. People constantly create way to share music for free. People hack into video games to get unlimited lives and power. The point is that the people who manufacture these products are human, and therefore fallible. They don't see all the potential in their product; the consumers do.

To take this a step further and address the common concern that technology will get out of hand - well, maybe it will, if the manufacturers don't think of everything. But the collective knowledge of a million users easily counteracts that. Technology is not one-sided. It's not just a tool, or text, or a system. We can't just quit it and go back to the farms. I think our generation is the first to really grow up around this stuff. It's part of how we think about the world, but it's not all of how we think about the world. But I agree that people need to be more aware than they are of its consequences in a broader sociological sense instead of just knowing how to manipulate the technology (which most of us don't know how to do anyway).