Note: This entry is part of a series where I am blogging chapter-by-chapter through the book 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 […]
Note: This entry is part of a series where I am blogging chapter-by-chapter through the book 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 […]
Note: This entry is part of a series where I am blogging chapter-by-chapter through the book 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 […]
Note: This entry is part of a series where I am blogging chapter-by-chapter through the book 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 […]
Note: This entry is part of a series where I am blogging chapter-by-chapter through the book 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. […]
Note: This entry is part of a series where I am blogging chapter-by-chapter through the book 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 […]
Note: This entry is part of a series where I am blogging chapter-by-chapter through the book 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 […]
Note: This entry is part of a series where I am blogging chapter-by-chapter through the book 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 […]
Note: This entry is part of a series where I am blogging chapter-by-chapter through the book 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 […]
Note: This entry is part of a series where I am blogging chapter-by-chapter through the book We now continue our discussion of technology and the political arena. This chapter in particular is about the theoretical dimension of politics, i.e., how people have formulated the ideas behind our political system and how they interact with technology. […]