In Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, Queequeg, a South Sea harpooner visiting Nantucket, was offered a wheelbarrow to move his belongings from an inn to the dock. But he did not understand how it worked, and so, after putting all his gear into the wheelbarrow he lifted it onto his shoulders. Most travelers have done something that looked equally silly to the natives, for we are all unfamiliar with some local technologies. This is another way of saying that we do not know the many routines and small narratives that underlie everyday life in other societies.

David Nye, Technology Matters: Questions to Live With (MIT, 2006)