You - Technology = ???

Do you feel that the technologies you use configure you or make you who you are?

To answer that question, I feel that one must attempt to judge themselves separate from the "technologies". They must imagine themselves removed  from any situation where the interaction might occur and compare that person to who they are now. I believe that unless one has existed in a preliterate society, it is impossible to completely determine to what extent daily technologies affect and configure you. To evaluate the magnitude of something in life, one must not only completely understand it (and its role in your life) but also be able to alienate themselves from it. "To live and to understand fully, we need not only proximity but also distance." (Ong, 23) Having been raised in a literate world, I am fundamentally biased and can imagine no such separation from technologies of any kind. "Technologies are not mere exterior aids by also interior transformations of consciousness." (Ong, 23) The sheer act of using a pencil or reading a book has already so altered my version of reality that there is no "going back", no way of imagining my world with out them. For, since the first time I began to use the technology of writing to express words, I could no longer think of words without picturing them, no longer be able to define one without using another. Ong uses the metaphor of the musician to illustrate this point. One is unable to separate a musician from his music. To succeed at his art the musician "has to have interiorized the technology, made the tool or machine a second nature, a psychological part of himself". (Ong, 24) In using technology I have internalized it and made it a part of me, so much so that it is impossible to ever be separated. "The use of a technology can enrich the human psyche, enlarge human spirit, (and) set it free..." (Ong, 24)