This book questions whether technologies are the rational tangible scientific forwardthinking neutral objects they are so often perceived to be exploring instead how powerful mythic ideas about technologies drive our social understanding and our expectations of them. Against a rising tide of information we encounter significant technological scientific and medical advances which promise to create an educated humane and equal world. This book explores that promise deconstructing technologies to conclude that though they do afford us significant and empowering advances they remain largely cloaked in mystery and often promise more than they can deliver. Contributors from diverse intellectual backgrounds and political and epistemological stances spanning sociology and psychosocial investigations innovation studies and scientists combine philosophical inquiry and empirical case studies to create a book which is at once provocative innovative and exciting in the challenges it poses.