To answer this question, Carey asks how techniques take over and re-shape moral models of human society.
Techniques become metaphors that predispose particular ways of thinking.
They provide potent images about how we are connected to one another. How models of the civic adjust to the built communicative environment is the foundation of Carey's interest in the practical imagination of contemporary journalists who see the world is an environment to be mastered through explanation. Repertoires of explanation are journalistic technologies as much as the telephones, printing presses, satellites and computers on which journalists also depend. In the essays reprinted here, Carey's focus is not on the machines of journalism but on the pseudo-environment of media explanations that furnish contemporary culture. Technology, Carey has said, is the creation and expression of human purposes embodying concrete life.