Take, he gives as an example, cellular telephones. Most people don't really need cellular telephones. They could, so he says, do just as well by waiting until they got to a "land line" telephone before placing a call.

But, instead, they carry their cell phones with them everywhere, calling in bank lines, on the street, in automobiles, in classrooms—you name it, someone has found it necessary for instant communication with someone else.

Most of the time, using a cell phone is convenient but unnecessary. Nevertheless, according to my friend, a mammoth industry has been built on the premise that we need cellular phones to keep in touch with everybody at any moment of the night or day.

My friend also has a thing about television. He contends that we could well get along without it, that it's not necessary to have a constant barrage of commercials in our faces and to let CNN and Fox News continually recycle the same information all day long and trying to disguise it as new news.

He may be right about that. Television, and particularly television news, seems to get more and more superfluous with each passing year. It's only with live events that it really comes into its own. Most of the rest of the time, it's either a distraction or a kind of sleeping potion, depending on what or why you're watching it. Good for baby-sitting, bad for trying to write letters by.

My friend also is thumbs down on PDAs, personal digital assistants, devices like Palm Pilots, which store telephone numbers, allow one to write one's self notes (in a strange sort of shorthand) to remind us of what we have to do or what we've forgotten, and which lately have been programmed to send pictures back and forth and to play downloaded music, not to mention games.

Who needs all this stuff at one's 24-hour beck and call, he says. "What's the matter with a pad and pencil?" he asks.

I could go on, but you get the idea: technology is, so my friend says, not always necessary to our well-being.

So I think my friend is partly right. Speed is not necessarily the next thing to godliness. Faster is not necessarily better. Technology does not always equal "civilization" or even "the good life."

On the other hand, it is hard to shed technology once it is here. We have grown used to watching such monstrosities as The Apprentice and Survivor and thinking they are entertainment, and we are willing to allow 40,000 or so Americans to die in automobile accidents each year just to get from one place to another more rapidly.

And one can only guess that if somehow we were successfully able to invent the "beam" machine of Star Trek, when the time comes, we will say, "Beam me up, Scottie."

And hope our molecules didn't get confused with someone else's.

But, what the heck, no one ever said technology is perfect.