In the foreword to Mitchel Resnick's
Turtles, Termites and Traffic Jams, Seymour Papert identifies the "just-a-tool" fallacy. He says:
By this I mean the failure to distinguish between tools (reasonably described as "just tools") that improve their users' ability to do pre-existing jobs, and another kind of "tool" (of which this book offers an excellent example) that are more than "just tools" because of their role in the creation of a job nobody thought to do, or nobody could have done, before.
Another quote for
del.icio.us/TomC/quotes.