Postman: how technology became supreme

...the success of 20th century technology in providing Americans with convenience, comfort, speed, hygiene, and abundance was so obvious and promising that there seemed no reason to look for other sources of fulfilment or creativity or purpose.  To every old-world belief, habit or tradition, there was and still is a technological alternative.  To prayer, the alternative is penicillin;  to family roots, the alternative is mobility;  to reading, the alternative is television;  to restraint, the alternative is immediate gratification;  to sin, the alternative is psychotherapy;  to political ideology, the alternative is popular appeal established through scientific polling.  There is even an alternative to the painful riddle of death, as Freud called it.  The riddle may be postponed through longer life, and then perhaps solved altogether through cryogenics.  At least no one can easily think of a reason why not...

[a century of scholarship undermining old sources of belief]...had the effect of losing confidence in our belief systems and therefore in ourselves.  Amid the conceptual debris, there remained one sure thing to believe in - technology.

 Technopoly p54-55