Abstract
As Leo Marx pointed out a long time ago, rhetoric of the "technological sublime" is an American tradition, and though it first emerged in response to the inventions of the Industrial Revolution—the steam engine, the telegraph, the railroad—the idea of the technological sublime is still with us in this so-called Information Age. With their emphasis on solutions and efficiency, popular images of information technology have contributed to a misleading mythology—a new rhetoric of the technological sublime—about technology's impact on culture and especially education.