Conferência  Our Machines, Our Selves.

Convidado: Ian Buchanan ( University of Wollongong/Austrália)

Palestra proferida em inglês

 

Don’t start from the good old things but the bad new ones.

-- Bertolt Brecht

 

We have not yet begun to ask under what new spell we exist.

-- Marshall McLuhan (GG 183)

 

In the space of only a handful of years, less than an evolutionary blink of the eye, the mobile digital device has gone from being present-at-hand, in Heidegger’s sense, to fully ready-to-hand, meaning it has passed from being something that is merely of interest, as perhaps an idea or concept might be, to being something that is a practical tool we use intuitively, without conscious thought. This trajectory is of course the one mapped out for us by the designers and manufacturers of digital technology. The great technological revolution of the early 1970s, when Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were just geek university drop-outs, not billionaire gurus, came about because innovators like Gates and Jobs could see that computers had the potential to be machines that people used in their homes and in their everyday lives. 

 

The prevailing view until then had been that computers were both too complicated and too expensive for anything but commercial, military or enthusiast (i.e., geek) applications. And even then they had no idea of just how pervasive digital technology could and would become once they let the genie out of the bottle. They unleashed a veritable tidal wave of technological innovation that led to the development of the World Wide Web – the internet existed for two decades before the web, but it wasn’t useable. Once home computers and then their mobile spawn became internet-enable a cultural revolution followed. Although the dot.com boom that was supposed to follow this union didn’t live up to expectations in the first instance, the cultural changes it wrought are still unfolding. The web giants, Amazon, Facebook and Google belong to this era and we’ve only scratched this surface in our understanding of how these corporations have transformed the contemporary world.

 

Not only do we use the mobile digital device without thought, now, as Heidegger said of hammers, it has in many ways supplanted thought, thus rendering large parts of our minds redundant. So long as we have Google maps we don’t need to remember the way home or know how to read a map in order to get somewhere – our device can tell us. Nor do we need to remember to pick up groceries, our device can remind us to do that, or else enable us to order them home-delivered. Similarly we can program our TVs no matter where we are and we can connect with friends via social media no matter where they are. And since practically everyone has a mobile digital device – and not just in the first world, either – these days we don’t even need to concern ourselves with such old-fashioned questions as to whether so-and-so has a phone.

The question is: how are our machines changing us?