Technocriticism is a branch of critical theory devoted to the study of technological development considered as personal and social practices of research, invention, appropriation, use, argumentation, and discourse, rather than as the straightforward accumulation of useful inventions. Technocriticism studies these prosthetic practices in both their practical and cultural significance, documents and analyzes both their private and public uses, and often devotes special attention to the relations among these different uses and dimensions.

Technocritical theory can be either primarily descriptive or prescriptive in tone. Descriptive forms of technocriticism can be discerned in some scholarship that is considered instead as history of technology, science and technology studies, and especially technocultural theory. The more prescriptive forms of technocriticism consist of the various branches of technoethics, for example, media criticism, bioethics, neuroethics, roboethics, existential risk assessment and some elements of environmental criticism and design theory.

While technocultural theory and technoethical discourse are distinguishable from one another and irreducible to one another, technocriticism often analyzes associations, tensions, and interdependencies between them.

Figures engaged in technocritical scholarship and theory include Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour (who work in the closely related field of science studies), N. Katherine Hayles (who works in the field of Literature and Science), Phil Agre and Mark Poster (who work in the closely related field of information studies), Marshall McLuhan and Friedrich A. Kittler (who work in the closely related field of media studies), Susan Squier and Richard Doyle (who work in the closely related field of biomedical studies), and Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, and Michel Foucault (critical theorists and philosophers who wrote about technology).

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