In fact, technology was not widely discussed as an important societal force until suprisingly recent times, despite early work by Karl Marx and others. A plot of word frequency in English books (at the top of this post) shows that even though science, industry, and invention have long been discussed, discourse on technology was all but silent before the middle of the 1900's. Technology was not included as a major theme in the Encyclopedia Britannica until 1974 (reference, p. 47), it was first mentioned in a Presidential State of the union address in 1939 (1,2), and the Society for the History of Technology was not founded until 1958 (reference, p. 3).

Today technology is widely recognized as a powerful force that shapes our lives, but because of its conceptual late-start, there is still much that we don’t understand about it. To start with, our cultural understanding of technology is mostly wrong. The common story is that individual inventors create new technology whole cloth from isolated workshops. Their inventions are acts of creative genius, which are not anticipated by society at large and quickly transform the status quo. This idea is enshrined in our education and legal systems. For example, the 8th grade social studies teaching standards in California instruct students to "Name the significant inventors and their inventions and identify how they improved the quality of life" (standard 8.12.9), and the patent system is based on the idea that “a lone genius can solve problems that stump the experts, and that the lone genius will do so only if properly incented” (reference, p.1).