Chris Rettstatt rides his bike to work, makes homemade bread and jam, and scribbles out business ideas on pieces of paper taped to his walls rather than using a software program.

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Anu Garg has spent the last six years eliminating electronic gadgets from his life. All three spend their days working with technology. Yet when it comes to what they allow into their lives, they are highly selective.

They don’t just buy a cellphone, a hand-held computer or a laptop. They choose and weed, according to how they want electronic objects to shape their lives and according to the personal image they want to project.

All are aware, perhaps more than most, that the personal choices they make about technology are a reflection not only of the way they perceive themselves but also of the way they would like to be perceived by others.

“Information technology is the most distinctive part of contemporary culture,” said Albert Borgmann, a philosophy professor at the University of Montana at Missoula who has written extensively about technology’s impact on society. To want to appropriate it and define themselves with it, he said, is only natural.

And surprisingly, perhaps, it is often those who occupy themselves most intensively with technology who have put the most thought into its role in defining who they are.

Mr. Chahil, 50, has held various high-level marketing positions at Apple, Sony and Palm, where he started as chief marketing officer and now serves as adviser.

Eleven years spent as a child in a military boarding school in his native northern India helped Mr. Chahil develop an allergy to clutter. He suspects that his attitude toward the technology in his life is related.

Mr. Chahil, who is on the road frequently, has eliminated the laptop computer from his luggage and now boards planes with no electronic devices except a Palm VII and a cellphone. If he must take a laptop along because it contains a presentation, he checks it with his luggage.

At home in Los Altos, Calif., Mr. Chahil is working to streamline everything from kitchen appliances to the television. Most audiovisual equipment is being hidden in one clever way or another, and he is starting to use his Palm as a remote control to take the place of four separate devices. The same will also happen eventually to his garage door opener, his home lighting and his alarm clock.

Mr. Rettstatt’s daily life is dominated by technology. Mr. Rettstatt, 30, is a co-founder of a children’s Web site called KidFu, based in Chicago. He spends the better part of his days sending e-mail, composing electronic documents, sending instant messages, monitoring chat rooms and developing Web pages. Yet he is acutely aware of the way technology shapes who he is. He doesn’t own a laptop, for instance, because “I don’t want to be the type of person who works on planes and in hotel rooms,” he said.

“There’s something about working with technology that makes people want to become Quakers,” Mr. Rettstatt said.

Juliet B. Schor, a professor of sociology at Boston College and author of “The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don’t Need,” said such sentiments were not uncommon. “Some people understand that the potential of the technology isn’t necessarily how it actually plays out,” she said.

And few people are better situated to understand this than those who spend their days surrounded by the flotsam and jetsam of the computer era. The more some people think about it, the less they want technology encumbering their lives.

As a consultant with AT&T Labs in the Seattle area, Mr. Garg spends his days preoccupied with the care and feeding of several computer servers, as well as the maintenance of his nine-year-old e-mail service, A Word a Day (www.wordsmith.org), which sends a new word daily to520,000 subscribers in 210 countries.Yet Mr. Garg, 35, has made a conscious effort to eliminate various bits of technology from his life.

Six years ago, Mr. Garg was the very prototype of a nerd, complete with a pocket protector containing whatever he could stuff into it.