ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with a basic question: what does technology do? In one sense the question is easily dealt with: technologies allow individuals to act upon the world. That is to say, he or she is enabled to make an intervention that can make a difference both to world and to experience of the technology user. Marshall McLuhan is famous for his work on media and for the critical conceptual breakthroughs he made in this field during the 1960s. In terms of media his work is usually associated with its electronic forms such as television and the telephone. technology use is dialectical, wherein to use another of McLuhan's aphorisms "we become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us." Through the development and application of technology, world is transformed and is continually transformable. Before considering that question it may be constructive to give an example of how technologies can be encoded with specific social relations.
