They seek the causes of history in the texts and social movements of the time, in the political structures, in the global conflicts over basic resources, etc. These sorts of considerations help us understand how we arrived where we are, why we believe what we do, why the national borders are as they are, why the distribution of wealth is as it is, etc. The spiritual and cultural reservations that the oriental peoples may have toward our technology will avail them not at all. The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts, but alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance. The concept remains rather vague, but I have alluded to the thrust of it in mentioning some of the noetic differences that exist between oral and literate cultures.
Technologies can affect our information processing in other ways as well.
The role of memory and inferential abilities in an oral culture, for instance, are quite different than in our culture. In our culture, you 'know' poetry when you have read it and have absorbed the atmospheres and can infer something about the political, social, and literary context of the work. Tests at university do not require students to show how well they have memorised the poems. In an oral culture, however, your knowledge of poetry would very much be a matter of how much you could recite. The emphasis in knowledge acquisition tends to be much more literal and the capacity to memorise large amounts of material is essential.