Media and Technology; Philosophical Perspectives

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Discussions about the changes media and technology bring to culture, and whether these are to be judged good or bad, are as old as philosophy itself. Media and technology have always had their, often ‘apocalyptic’, critics and their often ‘utopian’apologists. With the rapid development and spread of media and technology in the 20th and 21st century, the debate between these two parties has intensified. Yet we are now beginning to realize that overarching approaches have limited value when it comes to evaluating media and technology. Technologies acquire their meaning in their concrete use. In this course, we will concentrate on a number of philosophical approaches that help us understand the influence of media and technology. We will start with the so-called classic philosophy of media (McLuhan and Ong) and discuss whether specific technologies and media, like writing and print, provoke structural changes in patterns of thought, action and experience. Or, applied to a more current example: Is Google making us stupid? Next, we will deal with the classic philosophy of technology and discuss whether the machines that are supposed to serve us, are now turning the tables on us, making us humans their servants. Is technology alienating us from life and from our humanity? We will then move on to present day philosophy of media and technology, that steers away from broad, essentialist, condemnations or praises of technology and media. We will address the work of Don Ihde and Peter Paul Verbeek on technological mediation, and the work of David Lyon on the intricate relations of present day society and surveillance technologies. Specific empirical work is explored, e.g. a phenomenological approach to the use of webcamera’s in networks of care and Sherry Turkle’s work on intimacy with robots. Also addressed is the problem how to ethically evaluate new and emerging technologies that blur the boundaries between human beings and things that ethics used to be based on.