While reading Damon Young's 2008 book Distraction— which I highly recommend– I came across this nice bit about technology, freedom, and responsibility.

He first makes the case that the idea of becoming freer by abandoning technology won't work:

The essence of technology isn't cogs or computer chips, it's our way of being, our "essence." If this is so, then there's no point trying to flee to Arcadia– we can only liberate technology as we unfetter ourselves….

From the humble crafts of Aristotle's Greece to the mechnical presses that printed Heidegger's Being and Time and the keyboard I'm typing on, a varied but continuous chain of technology is in use. In that sense, we can't destroy technology, because we're indissolubly linked with it. We can't define ourselves against machines, because they're part of us.

He then goes on to talk about Star Trek's Borg as an example of an extreme engagement with technology, but then argues that

there is one crucial way in which we are not the Borg: if we are inextricably linked to technology, we don't have the luxury of a "hive mind." We have the weight of liberty: the opportunity and obligation to craft a life…. If we're the slaves of technological necessity, we have to forge our own necessities. In the name of everyday, ordinary freedom, we must be what machines can never be: the custodians of ourselves.

This is a simple, good way to think about everyday technologies: do they increase your sense of freedom, or do they constrain you?