the field are on a course that overlaps and converges with human behavior and institutions. Why that is relevant to this research may be discerned in a remark made as long ago as 1983, when momentum in the high-tech industry was just beginning to build: that as a practical matter, a definition of technology was becoming increasingly difficult to settle on. because of the all-too-human values into the service of which technology was being pressed even then, "correct usage of the word in its original sense seems almost beyond recovery" (Pacey, 1983, p. 3). Accordingly, wrote Pacey, the concept of technology were best approached "as a human activity and as a part of life . . . not only as comprising machines, techniques and crisply precise knowledge, but also as involving characteristic patterns of organization and imprecise values" (p. 4).
That analysis yields two contradictory inferences at the same time. One is that high technology proceeds well in advance of human capacity to cope with it instrumentally and practically, and the other is that human appetite for and adaptations to technological capacity remain insatiable, irrespective of human capacity to use it. It was surely prescient of Turing, in his seminal theory of computing potential, to suggest not only that a machine can be created and then programmed to learn but also that "at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted" (Turing, 1995, p. 19). Indeed, programming syntax and technology sophistication evolved so that unsophisticated technology users became commonplace. Such terms as configure, partition, interface, port, drive, and read/write would have been arcane to most people in the early 1970s but as of 2006 have long since entered the lexicon.
But perpetual innovation, whether technical or lexical, is not necessarily the same as...