Matthew Henry John Bartlett

Said Charles C Adams in The Unity in Creation and the Bi-directional Character of Technological Artifacts:

… the relational properties of artifacts are unconsciously designed into them. Consider the calculator. It was designed to facilitate the rapid processing of simple mathematical calculations. In addition to accomplishing that, however, it creates an environment whereby the user tends to transfer a narrow, specific, and justifiable trust in the functional reliability of the calculator to a broader and non-justifiable trust in the representational meaning of the calculation. In the days before the calculator, when the slide rule was in use, its properties required its user to estimate an answer in order to know where to place the decimal point. Having to make that estimation resulted in a healthy level of skepticism regarding the meaning of any particular computational result. The calculator, by removing the need to estimate, removes the healthy skepticism accompanying the estimation, and fosters an unwarranted level of credulity.

[via DJM]

The article feels to me like the beginning of an answer to the “so what on earth are we supposed to do about it?” feeling one gets reading Neil Postman.