In the 16th century, Venetian and French glassmakers perfected a technique of coating glass with an alloy of silver to produce an effective mirror. Mirrors soon proliferated in public spaces and private homes, and owning a pocket or hand mirrors soon proliferated in status. The mirror, you might say, was an early personal technology—ingenious, portable, effective—and like all such technologies, it changed its users. By giving us, for the first time, a readily available image of ourselves that matched what others saw, it encouraged selfconsciousness and introspection and, as some worried, excesses of vanity.
By the 19th century, it was the machines of the Industrial Revolution—the power loom, the motor, the turbine—that prompted concern about the effects of technology on the person. Karl Marx argued that factory work alienated the worker from what he was toiling to produce, transforming him into "a cripple, a monster." Men were forced to become more like machines: efficient, tireless and soulless.
Today's personal technologies, particularly the cell phone and the digital video recorder, have not provoked similar worries. They are marvels of individual choice, convenience and innovation; they represent the democratization of the power of the machine. Our technologies are more intuitive, more facile and more responsive than ever before. In a rebuke to Marx, we have not become the alienated slaves of the machine; we have made the machines more like us and in the process toppled decades of criticism about the dangerous and potentially enervating effects of our technologies.
The word "coat" (Line 1, Para. 1) means ______.

A. to cover sth. with a layer of sth.
B. to combine two different things
C. to make sth, into the shape of a coat
D. to put a coat on sth.