Computer-based technologies amplify the scientistic notion of thinking as data processing, and they amplify forms of knowledge that can be made explicit, digitalized, and communicated as context-free data and images. These technologies amplify the modern view of temporality that frames the individual's experience of time in terms of what is seen as relevant to an immediate problem or a personal sense of meaning, rather than the time cycles of the ecological and cosmological realm, of which nonmodern cultures are deeply aware. Computer use also amplifies a conduit view of language that is essential to the self-universalizing characteristics of modern consciousness. This view, like the metaphor "information superhighway," creates the illusion that what is being communicated between computers is culturally neutral -- that is, objective, context-free data. Thus, computer-based education, emphasizes a decontextualized pattern of thinking, which increasingly reduces sensitivity to local contexts, cultural patterns, and ecosystems.