Society has no needs, values, or desires, unless by these we mean the needs, values and desires of particular people. SET as a course ignores, evades, or denies this simple and observable fact of reality. Just as a group of pencils cannot be sharpened, except where each pencil is sharpened individually, so can society not act or be acted upon as such. Technology, we are told, is a social activity. This is in every important way false.
Technology is the application of conceptual knowledge to produce the means of obtaining values.
Individual persons can, do, and must engage in this activity regularly to survive. This is even true of people working in groups. Imagine a team of programmers at a software company who are developing a new operating system. The team members divide the workload among themselves, and proceed individually to write sections of code. Perhaps, when they have completed their sections, they go over them in groups, but even if they do so, each member of the group individually focuses on and evaluates the code.