The book explores the limitations of conventional ways of thinking about technology and its social context, both liberal democratic ideals, and Marxist lines of thought, concluding with a call for the reform of technology and the device paradigm via what he calls focal things and practices.

Chapters 4-6 go together and make several key points: any theory—like Borgmann's to-be-proposed “device paradigm,” needs to deal with science both in relation to technology and as an epistemological basis for truth claims.

However, though science “explains everything more precisely and more generally than any prior mode of explanation,” it also has explanatory limits and negative effects when too heavily relied upon, and may be enhanced, again, by the device paradigm (22).

Part 1 of Borgmann's book gave background information and began to argue that how the modern world relates to technology follows a pattern, which he calls the device paradigm.

Through the Enlightenment and then the Industrial Revolution, humanity began to believe that technology was the key to “liberation from toil and the advancement of literacy, eating, and health” (38).

With technology's “promise” thus in place—and he's careful to note some value and truth in said promise—it gradually took the prominence that led to the pattern in question.

Borgmann argues that insofar as we have become reliant upon devices in this sense, “the coherent and engaging character of the pretechnological world of things” has been jeopardized (47).

Borgmann accomplishes this goal by focusing on more examples of the device paradigm in action, by exploring how advertising highlights the pattern, and by noting how people tend to now equate “real and simulated experiences” (55).

Chapters 11-12 attempt to “give the intuitive and descriptive account of the technological pattern a measure of systematic firmness and clarity” (57).

Basically, Borgmann here looks at “alternative models and perspectives” regarding technology—those of Arendt, Tribe, Walker, Kuhn, Winner, Billington, etc.—and at paradigm as a means of knowing/explaining in general, concluding that “the technological device can be discerned in seemingly conflicting contentions about the significance of machines, means, and ends in technology,” and that “the device paradigm reveals more clearly than any other just how and to what extent people move away from engagement” (57, 68, 77).

Finally, he notes that his “demonstration” of this main part of his thesis “can attain at least a measure of cogency,” and thus moves to the topic of Chapters 13-16, dealing with “society and politics” (78).

Chapters 13-16 of Borgmann's text rest upon the assumption that “we should bring [the device paradigm] to the surface and to our attention” in all areas, and consequently that “we should judge society and politics in light of technology” (78).

In other words, the device paradigm operates on society in an even deeper way than economics, so one must “turn to the examination of liberal democracy to throw light on the ways in which technology has come to rule our lives,” since it is within liberal democracy that technology has typically acquired such power (85).

Borgmann quickly surveys representative data, which he argues “is compatible with the relation to technology that has been explicated above” (106).

Basically, people have “trust or hope in technology,” though this doesn't necessarily equate to more political or social good (106).

it cannot lead to the good life because it cannot escape the determination of the device paradigm, which inevitably only supports its own socio-political effects (113).

In other words, now that the device paradigm has been presented, explained, etc., Borgmann wants to finish the section off—in the context of labor and leisure—by “exhibit[ing] in them how technology has led to a radical transformation of the human condition” (114).

Following this explanation—which ties together multiple issues, all related to how the device paradigm clouds our perception of once focal activities, in this case, work—he moves to the chapter's finish: the only reason we’re in this predicament regarding labor is because part of the “promise of technology” has always been to alleviate labor, and so we take an attitude of “complicity” to the effects of its supposedly doing so, and will likely continue to do so until the inevitable “widespread elimination of work,” which begins with its already-in-progress “degradation” (120-124).

Borgmann spends multiple pages explaining exactly how and why happiness is in decline, all in context of what most people take to be “the good life,” and always in relation to technology's role (125-128).

We do find this to be the case, and Borgmann details how we “cope” with this problem, spending time talking about numerous issues related to family life: working families, entertainment, advertising, television (137-143)—the last of which he concludes the chapter with, arguing that “it provides a center for our leisure and an authority for the appreciation of commodities.

The chapter and Part 2 end with a fascinating number of pages in which Borgmann tries to prognosticate on the topic of the upcoming (for him in 1984) “microelectronic revolution”—i.e., e.g., computers (148-153).

Chapter 20 of Borgmann's book begins the task of Part 3, which can be summed up simply: “Focal things and practices can empower us to propose and perhaps to enact a reform of technology” (155).

Consequently, he spends several pages dismissing attempts within the paradigm: “the endeavor to find a new order at the heart of technology” (159), Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974) (160), etc.

This is due, first, to “the mistaken assumption that the shaping of our lives can be left to a series of individual decisions” (206)—in other words, we don't “establish and commit oneself to a practice” involving focal things (207).

Borgmann offers the examples of running and the “culture of the table” to discuss how focal things and practices are to be enjoyed simply for their centering force in and of themselves (202-206).

He concludes the chapter by noting that “Countering technology through a practice is to take account of our susceptibility to technological distraction, and it is also to engage the peculiarly human strength of comprehension, i.e., the power to take in the world in its extent and significance and to respond through an enduring commitment” (210), before previewing the book's final section, which will deal with defending and further examining this chapter's arguments.

Several “concrete consequences” follow from this: “an intelligent and selective attitude toward technology,” “a distinct notion of the good life,” a “kind of prosperity,” “deepening of charity,” and the strengthening of the family (221-226).

Following from this, he discusses how reform-via-focal-practice will affect work—“defining and securing a space for engaging work” (239), and what he calls the “perfect technological city” (242).