The ways that technology affects everyday life are probably too numerous to count. The environment of the average person in metropolitan cultures is largely fabricated by technology. These words are being written using a computer, in a room made of manufactured materials, many synthetic. The room is connected to an electrical grid, which is monitored and controlled by more computers. Within a few feet, there is running water, a microwave oven and a television set. Outside the window, there is a parking lot filled with cars.
It is very difficult to generalize about technology, because the term covers so many phenomena. Among those who have studied the effects of technology on everyday life are technological optimists, technological pessimists and even technological objectivists who say the technology is neutral and its value depends on how people employ it. A few thinkers have taken a more nuanced and complex view of how technology affects everyday life.
Social critic Ivan Illich, writing in "Tools for Conviviality," says that technology has two watersheds. When a new technology first appears, it can create dramatic and seemingly positive effects. This is a first watershed. Over time, however, the technology that once served people becomes a technology that people serve. Where the car once seemed like a great liberation from time and space, for example, it now becomes an expensive necessity. Illich said that everyday life in modern times has become captured by velocity.
Jacques Ellul, a French philosopher, said that technology in itself was not the problem that plagues modernity. Technology, he said, was just an expression of a deeper drive that does have a pernicious effect on everyday life; and that drive is for efficiency. The drive to optimize outputs and production, says Ellul, has been promoted as liberation, but has actually enslaved people to a "complex of artificial operational objectives." People's everyday lives, he says, are rendered frantic and often superficial.
Alf Hornborg, a Swedish anthropologist, has written about technology and "unequal exchange." He disagrees with technological objectivists who claim that technology is morally neutral, and has tried to show how technology is embedded in a process that creates great social disparities as well as environmental destruction. The technology that makes things easier for some has the opposite effect on others, who remain out of view. The computer on someone's desk represents the mountaintop that was destroyed to get the coal to make the electricity, the pollution of microchip production, the mines where the metals are extracted, the fossil fuel for plastics and manufacture, and the wars fought to control the fossil fuels. The everyday life of the computer user is a perspective out of view of the life of the West Virginian living next to a slag pond, the silica miner in India or the Iraqi caught in the crossfire.