ABSTRACT
With increased worldwide industrialization, technology is perceived to be the cause of a myriad of social, political, and environmental problems. These problems are blamed on technology because, as a mode of thinking, it tends to reduce everything to mere instrumentation, including all that has been traditionally thought to have intrinsic value. Nicholas Negroponte's project to provide laptops to poor children all over the world to honor the humanitarian and constructivist goal of a universal learning environment makes the global adoption of this technology all the more problematic. The box containing these computers may release, once opened, the uncontrollable, unredeemable forces of global uniformity and the resistance, often violent, that accompanies it. The dominant cultural orientation is the technological paradigm. It does not dominate everywhere, in the same way or to the same degree, but it is the reigning worldview in Western cultures.
