We think about technology in radically different ways than our grandparents. Sure, they had industrial machinery, and plumbing, cars, planes and trains, and the earliest mass-media technology (radio, cinema, TV); but these things were new, strange, and slightly unsettling to most people. Today's generation (and tomorrow's!) takes tech for granted as an integral part of daily life in a way that amazes the older folks.
Does this mean that technology has changed the way we actually think?
A philosopher named
Martin Heidegger thought so. And he wrote a little something about the issue,
"The Question Concerning Technology". (NB: Heidegger was a philosopher, plus he wrote in German, so the original's a little...dense.) A
post on the TalkingPhilosophy blog summarizes it nicely this way:
He argues that we are all enmeshed in a technological way of life — our
problems, activities, agendas and so on happen in a social world where
everything is regarded as a standing reserve, a stockpile. [...] We see our problems as technological problems, and our solutions are technological too. It’s all
we can see because we’re stuck in the world we’ve thought oursleves into.
He tells us that we can maybe get out again by reflection on the senses in which
we are enveloped by technology, instead of further attempts to save ourselves
from it with yet more of it. We can look to art, he says, and maybe build
an aesthetic outlook into our way of life. We can think of the mountain as
beautiful, not simply as a source of coal.
What do you think? Is there really such a thing as "a technological way of life"? By using tech so much, have we forgotten how to solve our problems...except with more technology?? And do back-to-the-earth eco-types represent a new (old) way of thinking?
