Technology

Note: This entry is part of a series where I am blogging chapter-by-chapter through the book Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life ( TCCL) by Albert Borgmann. If you’re new, you may want to start at the Overview. As we saw in the last chapter, Borgmann thinks focal things and practices (gathered together under the heading of ‘focal concerns’) are central to the kind of reform of technology we need. In this and the next chapter, he wants to (a) defend focal concerns from any philosophical worries, and (b) show how focal concerns constitute the kind of reform of technology that we need. This chapter looks at focal concerns on a personal level, and so connects them up with a reform of technology in our personal, more than our public, lives. This is why the name of this chapter is “Wealth and the Good Life”: focal concerns constitute “wealth”, and lead to the much-sought-after “good life” that technology has been promising to us but failing to deliver. ...

Note: This entry is part of a series where I am blogging chapter-by-chapter through the book Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life ( TCCL) by Albert Borgmann. If you’re new, you may want to start at the Overview. The previous chapter took Nature as an intuitive source of helpful challenges to the technological paradigm. But Borgmann’s insight, spelled out in his concept of “focal things and practices”, is that what is true about Nature can be explored in a more general fashion. Moreover, Borgmann actually thinks that technology, while it can be a challenge to what we find meaningful in life, for that very reason heightens its beauty. We therefore don’t need to be pessimistic about its survival; we just need to pay attention to how and where we can cultivate focal things and practices despite the challenge that goes along with such effort. ...

Note: This entry is part of a series where I am blogging chapter-by-chapter through the book Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life ( TCCL) by Albert Borgmann. If you’re new, you may want to start at the Overview. This chapter is a sort of case study or example of something we might start deictic discourse (the subject of the last chapter) about in a fruitful way. Borgmann thinks that, in North America, nature (specifically as “wilderness”) is possibly the most obvious place to start looking for focal concerns to discourse deictically about. We’ll first start with a brief history of attitudes towards North American wilderness, then discuss previous attempts by conservationists to involve the wilderness in public discourse, and finally explore a new understanding of wilderness from within the context of our technological society. ...

Note: This entry is part of a series where I am blogging chapter-by-chapter through the book Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life ( TCCL) by Albert Borgmann. If you’re new, you may want to start at the Overview. We turn now to the chapter wherein Borgmann finally goes into detail about the kind of discourse he actually thinks can have an impact on the current state of technological society: deictic discourse. Deictic discourse is discourse guided by specific focal concerns. It’s hard to know exactly what that means, or why it’s especially effective, and this chapter unpacks its relevance. ...

Note: This entry is part of a series where I am blogging chapter-by-chapter through the book Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life ( TCCL) by Albert Borgmann. If you’re new, you may want to start at the Overview. This is the first chapter of Part 3, “The Reform of Technology”, where we are going to consider how focal things and practices can amount to a solid reform of technology. We have some difficult topics to cover: how have attempts already been made to reform technology? How can we use language, itself patterned and conditioned by technology, to speak of reform? What exactly are these vaunted “focal things and practices”? If reform is even possible, how can it be extended to the national/international dialogue? Ultimately the goal here is to repair society to that it can recover and re-appropriate the initial hopes and promises of technology. ...

Note: This entry is part of a series where I am blogging chapter-by-chapter through the book Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life ( TCCL) by Albert Borgmann. If you’re new, you may want to start at the Overview. The point of this last chapter of Part 2 is to explore how “stable” the technological condition is on its own. We need to address this question because we’ve established that the technological condition is in need of reform. But if the whole thing isn’t very stable to begin with, then reform/revolution is easy: we simply wait for technological culture to fall apart on its own. In fact, many critics of technology take essentially this view—they believe technology is inherently unstable or has self-defeating tendencies. Borgmann disagrees with this assessment. His view is that technology has the resources within itself to solve whatever problems confront it, even the internal problems. The way that it will solve these problems is by continuing to extend the Device Paradigm into new areas, until it encompasses the whole of existence. Thus it is not a matter of technology “running out of steam” (pun intended), except accidentally or incidentally; it’s a matter of being clear about what a fully-technologized reality looks like so that we can attempt the necessary reform before it gets to that point. And that reform can’t be implemented if we misjudge the strength of the technological position. ...

Note: This entry is part of a series where I am blogging chapter-by-chapter through the book Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life ( TCCL) by Albert Borgmann. If you’re new, you may want to start at the Overview. We come now to one of the longest and, in my opinion, most interesting chapters of TCCL. The counterpart to the subject of the previous chapter (labor in technological society) is leisure. We recall that the splitting of life’s occupations into two distinct modes (labor and leisure) mirrors exactly the working of the Device Paradigm. Labor becomes the hidden machinery and leisure the surface, the commodity we are fundamentally “about” in life. Borgmann points out in this chapter that critiquing technological labor (what we have done in the previous chapter) is therefore only one side of the story: even proponents of technological society would readily admit that technological labor may not be the most fulfilling or most meaningful aspect of technological life. But the reason we accept the kind of work available in technological society is because it opens the possibility of leisure, of happiness—this is what the work is for. Surely technological society’s most compelling argument is to be found in the supposed fruits of technology, a life of leisure. ...

Note: This entry is part of a series where I am blogging chapter-by-chapter through the book Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life ( TCCL) by Albert Borgmann. If you’re new, you may want to start at the Overview. The previous 16 chapters have sufficed to give us a good sketch of the character of technology, outlining it and delineating it in various ways. But now Borgmann is concerned to give the picture some depth, some attachment to the world that we all live in so as to impress upon us the seriousness of our current social predicament and how the Device Paradigm now typifies the structure of something so essentially quotidian as work. There are of course many other clear examples of the impact of technology in our world, in science, the military, etc… But work and leisure are concepts with which every citizen is intimate, and so showing the radical effect of technology in this sphere is a good way to implicate each of us in its operation. ...

Note: This entry is part of a series where I am blogging chapter-by-chapter through the book Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life ( TCCL) by Albert Borgmann. If you’re new, you may want to start at the Overview. This is the last chapter in the section on technology and its relationship with the political aspect of society. One of Borgmann’s primary insights here is that technology is a good explanation for the social and political apathy that is so prevalent, yet so disturbing in a nation like the US whose founding ideals are very much linked with political engagement. ...

Note: This entry is part of a series where I am blogging chapter-by-chapter through the book Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life ( TCCL) by Albert Borgmann. If you’re new, you may want to start at the Overview. In this chapter, Borgmann is interested in answering the question of how people actually relate to technology in our society, regardless of the role technology plays in the political theories that undergird society. Looking at empirical sociological data is difficult, because so many interpretations can be given to, e.g., survey data. So he acknowledges that we have to come to the data with a bit of a guiding premise, which the previous chapters have provided. ...