Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life

"Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life by Albert Borgmann, a philosopher who studied briefly under Heidegger. It was published 1984 and is definitely one of the foundational texts in philosophy of technology. Its chief contribution was to bring the focus on quality of life into the analysis. The point he was making in this book was that there are basically two types of paradigm to think about technology. On the one hand is the device paradigm: where all our experiences and daily life are somehow mediated by gadgets and technology. We heat our food in microwaves and use our heating systems to heat our house and listen to recorded music rather than going to concerts. The second, his normative idea, the one he wanted to be in, was the focal paradigm: and that was the real thing – like cooking your own food. His classic example of the device paradigm was buying frozen food in a supermarket, heating it in a microwave, and eating it while watching television. The good life and his alternative to that would be gathering the whole family and cooking your food on a stove, spending some time doing it and sitting down and conversing. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Much of it seems very basic and common sense but I think Borgmann really succeeded on a theoretical level in drawing a very nice framework. It wasn’t just a discussion of an ideal dinner; it was all hardcore philosophical theory, how to think and evaluate practices, and what to do about technology and what should be done. No, unlike Heidegger , who clearly influenced him a lot. Heidegger used the term ‘enframing’: that technology was becoming too ubiquitous and had its own agenda and was enframing all of the practices around us and leaving very little choice for the humans. To an extent Borgmann shares that view, but also he thinks there is a way out, and it’s more or less to identify the focal practices and perhaps even use technology to emphasise and enhance one’s enjoyment of those practices. Yes – for him the key is having humans recognise the moment of entrapment. It all boils down to commodification – whether your life experiences and the most pleasurable things in your life get commodified, and to an extent are no longer pleasant. His ultimate answer was having humans recognise that, and change their course of action. It’s fascinating, because there is a quote from Eric Schmidt, the Google CEO, where he says that what you expect from Google is not to show you what your choices are, but to make the choices on your behalf. So it is interesting: it brings you to the question of agency and free will, and even if free will is being commodified. I’m not sure it’s necessarily a question of the good life or of healthy citizenship and how much information you should have, and how many choices you should be making on your own to be a good citizen of the polis, but there are definitely parts of Borgmann’s theory that are applicable to analysing the current situation. He’s written several books since, but he authored one in 1999 called Holding On To Reality , which was kind of applying the same framework to the information society. I think Borgmann’s framework does have a future, because more and more of our experiences are still being commodified: reading is one, but look at the app economy – the whole point of that ecosystem is to commodify our experience and make sure that the iPad can do everything."