Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 13, No. 484.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>
Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2000 07:29:56 +0000
From: Arun-Kumar Tripathi <tripathi@statistik.uni-dortmund.de>
Subject: Review: Albert Borgmann on the Technological Paradigm
(Part I)
Greetings Scholars,
[Following is the NETFUTURE Newsletter, which deals with the relationship
of Technology and Human Responsibility eloquently written by Stephen Talbott.
--Specially, in this Issue of NETFUTURE newsletter. --There are "notes"
concerning the book, *Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life: A
Philosophical Inquiry*, by Albert Borgmann (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1984). Paperback, 302 pages. You would be reading --The review
--In this issue of Albert Borgmann's book, *Technology and the Character
of Contemporary Life*, may be the most important thing Stephen Talbott has
ever passed along in NETFUTURE. Prof. Borgmann offers a penetrating analysis
of technological society. Thank you and my sincere thanks to Prof. Albert
Borgmann. --Arun]
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Date: Tue, 20 Jan 1998 14:44:41 -0500
From: Stephen Talbott <stevet@MERLIN.ALBANY.NET>
NETFUTURE
Technology and Human Responsibility
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Issue #64 Copyright 1998 Bridge Communications January 20, 1998
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Editor: Stephen L. Talbott (stevet@oreilly.com)
On the Web: http://www.oreilly.com/people/staff/stevet/netfuture/
You may redistribute this newsletter for noncommercial purposes.
CONTENTS:
*** Editor's Note
*** Quotes and Provocations
Chains of Logic
Is Technology Good for Society? (Your Answer, Please)
Consulting as a Respectable Business
Technology and Chaos
*** How Technology Co-opted the Good (Part 1) (Steve Talbott)
Albert Borgmann on the technological paradigm
*** About this newsletter
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*** Editor's Note (14 lines)
The review in this issue of Albert Borgmann's book, *Technology and the
Character of Contemporary Life*, may be the most important thing I have
ever passed along in NETFUTURE. While recognized by philosophers of
technology as perhaps the preeminent American treatise on the
technological society, Borgmann's book has nevertheless been -- within my
own woefully restricted horizons -- the best-kept secret of the past
fourteen years. It not only carries out, in the most thorough-going way,
a razor-sharp critique of the "device paradigm" currently ruling our
society, but it also strengthens one's hope for the future. My two-part
review of the book will be concluded in the next issue.
SLT
[material deleted]
Is Technology Good for Society? (Your Answer, Please)
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In reading through an old issue of *Daedalus*, I came across this remark
by Joseph Weizenbaum (addressed to a doctor as part of an informal
discussion):
You were taught what to do if a patient were to walk into your office
and say, "Doctor, I want you to amputate my little finger, and how much
do you charge for that?" You would not do what the technologist does,
that is, ask..."What are the specifications? Do I have the resources?
Do I have the competence?" and if all these questions are answered
appropriately, say that you will perform the amputation. Instead, you
take ... responsibility for finding as best you can what the problem
is. You may decide that what is really necessary is aspirin or
bedrest, or an amputation of the foot, and you will behave accordingly,
quite independent of how much the patient is willing to pay you to cut
off his little finger. That is what you were taught as a physician.
That is precisely the opposite of what happens in almost all
engineering practice. ("Some Issues of Technology", *Daedalus*,
winter, 1980, p. 23)
A doctor, of course, acts within a world of concern that includes the
health and welfare of the patient. This lends an inescapably moral
quality to the treatment.
Not everyone would agree with Weizenbaum's indictment of the engineering
profession. I would like to ask NETFUTURE readers in the high-tech
industry the following questions (which bear, not just on engineers, but
on the industry as a whole):
* In your experience, does the high-tech industry operate within a
context of moral concern for the health and welfare of its customers
and the society of end users?
* If so, how primary is the concern, and via what pathways and practices
does it effectively find its way into industry performance?
I'd be interested in collecting your responses and sharing them with
readers. The wider the range of respondents, the better, so please
forward this invitation, as appropriate, to other relevant forums.
(Thanks to Nancy Phillips for passing along the old issue of *Daedalus*.)
[material deleted]
Technology and Chaos
--------------------
"Nature in its pristine state," writes Albert Borgmann, "now consists of
islands in an ocean of technology." There was a time when every shrine,
every temple, every city marked off a sacred and inhabitable district,
redeeming it from the surrounding primordial wildness, or "chaos". But
now there has been a reversal:
Whereas in the mythic experience the erection of a sanctuary
established a cosmos and habitat in the chaos of wilderness, the
wilderness now appears as a sacred place in the disorientation and
distraction of the encompassing technology. (*Technology and the
Character of Contemporary Life*, p. 190)
The technologies we employed to vanquish wilderness have now established
the rule, you might say, of a new chaos, from which we must wrest a truly
human habitation.
The reversal is profound. A wilderness that is threatened can no longer
stand as the ultimate challenge and threat. "Respect for the wilderness
will never again be nourished by its formerly indomitable wildness. On
the contrary. The wilderness now touches us deeply in being so fragile
and vulnerable (p. 194).
Borgmann does not disparage technology as such. It teaches us to respect
wilderness "not for its power but for its beauty." The power -- raging
storms, wild animals, impassable slopes, torrential floods -- can be
overcome by technology. But technology is powerless to convert the beauty
of wilderness into just another consumable commodity. It can make the
attempt only by
killing the wilderness or keeping it at bay. Technology kills the
wilderness when it develops it through roads, lifts, motels, and
camping areas. It keeps the wilderness at bay when, without affecting
untouched areas permanently, it insulates us from the engagement with
the many dimensions and features of the land, as it does through rides
in jet boats or helicopters. Here we can see that technology with its
seemingly infinite resourcefulness in procuring anything and everything
does have a clear limit. It can procure something that engages us
fully and in its own right only at the price of gutting or removing it.
Thus the wilderness teaches us not only to accept technology but also
to limit it. (p. 195)
Both the acceptance and the limitation, Borgmann argues, can be principled
and sensible. At one extreme, we would not turn people loose in the
wilderness with only a coat and loaf of bread. The hiker can make good
use of high-tech, lightweight gear. At the other extreme, we cannot
reasonably allow motor vehicles into wilderness areas and expect the
wilderness to remain as wilderness.
To require that people (or at most horses and mules) carry in whatever
is needed and leave no trash or scars is a rule that balances the
mature acceptance of technology with the openness to pristine nature in
its deep texture. Thus we become free for the wilderness without
courting the danger of disburdenment and disengagement. The burdens of
one's gear and of a climb are the ways in which the wilderness
discloses itself. They are onerous, to be sure, and taxing. And so
they call forth a discipline which is sensibly marked off not only
against the strain of labor and the pleasures of consumption but also
against the immature pursuit of pretechnological tasks. (p. 195)
Wilderness, according to Borgmann, is just one example of the "focal
things" that alone teach us to set proper bounds to technology. See the
review of his book, below.
SLT
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*** How Technology Co-opted the Good (Part 1) (266 lines)
>From Steve Talbott <stevet@oreilly.com>
Notes concerning the book, *Technology and the Character of Contemporary
Life: A Philosophical Inquiry*, by Albert Borgmann (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1984). Paperback, 302 pages.
Borgmann's book was published in 1984. I am reviewing it now because I
have just recently discovered it -- and because it offers as revelatory a
treatment of technological society as I have yet found.
The Pursuit of Consumption
--------------------------
The social role of any given technology is often analyzed as a means-end
relation; the technological device is the means, and what we produce with
it reflects our ends. This is useful as far as it goes. but Borgmann
takes us to a deeper level, where we see that the relatively strict
separation of means from end is one of the decisive and damaging features
of our technological society.
Deeply meaningful human activity is activity in which ends and means
*cannot* always be neatly distinguished. When a musician practices, is he
simply developing the means to perform, or is he also gaining some of the
joy of performance? When a family camps out, is the campfire merely a
means for producing warmth and light, or is the pleasure of building it
part of the whole reason for camping? Is a woodcarver's goal nothing but
the production of finished figures, or does he also aim at the expressive
satisfaction of the carving itself?
The technological device, Borgmann argues, embodies negative answers to
questions like these. A home's central heating system *is* only for the
production of warmth, and a CD player is only for the final production of
music. The social context and disciplined engagement of the music-making
is now separated from the enjoyment of the music. In general, "what
distinguishes a device is its sharp internal division into a machinery and
a commodity procured by that machinery" (p. 33).
Machinery is a means, of course, and it is a mere means. But the
import of that mereness is often overlooked both by the critics and the
defenders of technology. Since machinery is merely a means, so the
proponent of technology reasons, it will serve whatever ends and not
constrain our choice of ends. [But] this view overlooks the fact that
the rise of mere means is a revolutionary event and transforms from the
ground up what now can count as an end. (p. 63)
Radically different machineries -- for example, a player piano, record
player, tape recorder, and CD player -- can produce the same result, which
is largely indifferent to the various machineries. By contrast, the
*activity* of music-making is substantially defined by the particular
context through which the music comes about, and is therefore inseparable
from the context.
Borgmann shows how the machinery of a device is progressively hidden from
view in technology's background, while the now decontextualized commodity
produced by the device occupies the foreground. This separation
encourages us toward the unrooted, trivial, and distracting pursuit of
consumption, wherein our activity loses all depth and focus. Carrying the
trend to its logical extreme, we would seek our commodious pleasures
altogether without context, via direct stimulation of the brain -- a
notion more realistic and closer to acceptance today than when Borgmann
wrote his book. In sum,
Central heating plants, cars, and T.V. dinners are technological
devices that have the function of procuring or making available a
commodity such as warmth, transportation, or food. A commodity is
available when it is at our disposal without burdening us in any way,
i.e., when it is commodiously present, instantaneously, ubiquitously,
safely, and easily. Availability in this sense requires that the
machinery of a device be unobtrusive, i.e., concealed, dependable, and
foolproof.
Borgmann distinguishes technological devices from the "focal things and
practices" that can "center and illuminate our lives." Music (produced
and enjoyed in a social, historical, and disciplined context), the
experience of wilderness, and the culture of the table (where the
production and handling of food, the decorous ordering of the table, and
the social and conversational tradition all play a role) are examples of
such focal practices. In general, focal things are
concrete, tangible, and deep, admitting of no functional equivalents;
they have a tradition, structure, and rhythm of their own. They are
unprocurable and finally beyond our control. They engage us in the
fullness of our capacities. (p. 219)
But the distinction between commodity and focal practice is increasingly
glossed over today:
There is a widespread and easy acceptance of equivalence between
commodities and [focal] things even where the experiential differences
are palpable. People who have traveled through Glacier Park in an
air-conditioned motor home, listening to soft background music and
having a cup of coffee, would probably answer affirmatively and without
qualification when asked if they knew the park, had been in the park,
or had been through the park. Such people have not felt the wind of
the mountains, have not smelled the pines, have not heard the red-
tailed hawk, have not sensed the slopes in their legs and lungs, have
not experienced the cycle of day and night in the wilderness. The
experience has not been richer than one gained from a well-made film
viewed in suburban Chicago.
"It is," Borgmann claims from beginning to end, "the pervasive
transformation of things into devices that is changing our commerce with
reality from engagement to ... disengagement" (p. 61). He argues time and
again that no escape from the distraction and fatuity of consumerism is to
be had by working within the current technological paradigm -- for
example, by defending "values" and trying to employ technology as a means
for achieving worthwhile values. This is to continue accepting the
artificial separation of means and ends that must be overcome if we are to
rediscover focal things and practices. What is required is that we take
up with the world and with technology in an entirely different and more
conscious manner.
Digital Watches, Skyscrapers, and Televisions
---------------------------------------------
Borgmann is not altogether pessimistic about the possibilities. But
before looking at the sources of his hope, I would like to characterize
what he calls the "device paradigm" a little more closely.
If you showed a modern, spring-driven watch to Bacon, Descartes, or
Newton, they would have little difficulty in understanding its workings.
But show them a digital watch and they would, as Borgmann points out, be
stumped. They could understand it only after pursuing graduate studies in
modern logic, mathematics, physics, chemistry, and engineering. Yet they
could learn how to *use* such a watch even more easily than a spring-
driven one.
Further, the digital watch is more convenient, giving us the time "in
digits, with more precision, more variety, greater completeness, and with
less bulk, without the need to wind it up, to turn it past 31 November, or
to take account of leap years" (p. 149). The convenience is purchased at
the price of a less accessible machinery.
This pattern holds even for such "devices" as food and skyscrapers. When,
for example, food is reconceived as an end product compounded of certain
textures, tastes, colors, smells, and nutritive substances, it can be
engineered and consumed as a commodity with little relation to the land
and cultivation or to the skills and social ordering of kitchen and table.
Technologically transformed wine
no longer bespeaks the peculiar weather of the year in which it grew
since technology is at pains to provide assured, i.e., uniform,
quality. It no longer speaks of a particular place since it is a blend
of raw materials from different places. (p. 49)
Or take the skyscraper:
It makes space available in an abstract three-dimensional grid into
which one inserts oneself through an equally abstract transportation
system. As always, there are echoes of pretechnological experiences in
these devices. Thus a higher location in a high-rise is better and
more prestigious as though, being up there, one had mastered a mountain
or were lord over those below. But in fact one has no real sense of
position or location; one is not oriented to those around one in the
other apartments or offices, and one is not related to a center because
skyscrapers, as a rule, have none. (p. 67)
The same spatial indifference also holds true of the skyscraper's relation
to its setting. Nothing much about the building changes as you move
between locations thousands of miles apart.
Borgmann points out that while "the machinery of technology can still be
obtrusive and disruptive, as in strip mining or highway construction," it
shapes our lives most profoundly where it is concealed behind readily
available commodities.
An affluent suburb is seemingly the incarnation of the pastoral garden
that [some observers] see threatened by the incursion of the machine.
And yet such a suburb is technological through and through. It is a
pretty display of commodities resting on a concealed machinery. There
is warmth, food, cleanliness, entertainment, lawns, shrubs, and
flowers, all of it procured by underground utilities, cables, station
wagons, chemical fertilizers and weed killers, riding lawn mowers, seed
tapes, and underground sprinklers. The advanced technological setting
is characterized not by the violence of machinery but by the
disengagement and distraction of commodities.
Borgmann offers many other examples of the same pattern. Insurance
disburdens us (through a mostly hidden "machinery" of contracts, legal
provisions, and organizational structures) of the difficult and sometimes
unpleasant relations between neighbors in times of trouble; it reduces the
uncertainties of neighborly obligation to the certainty of a cash payment
that puts an end to all further obligation.
Or take personal transport: when we walk or run, our breathing, our
muscles, our senses are challenged and engaged by the environment through
which we move. At the opposite pole, busy executives go to a health club
and walk a treadmill to nowhere (gaining commoditized "health factors")
while occupying their minds with business literature.
It is the glory of technology, Borgmann argues, that it "meliorates
dangerous, injurious, and back-breaking work" (p. 118). But much of this
potential has already been achieved, and it has gotten us into a bad
habit: we continue to think of all forms of disengagement as if they were
liberation. Commenting on the view that carrying water is insufferable
drudgery, Borgmann grants that, if the purpose of carrying water is merely
to obtain a commodity, then the concealed modern plumbing system is vastly
superior to the old-fashioned well. But then he cites the Old Testament
figure of Rebecca:
As [Daniel] Boorstin reminds us, Rebecca, going to the well, not only
found water there but also companionship, news of the village, and her
fiance. These strands of her life were woven into a fabric technology
has divided and privatized into commodities. (p. 119)
Borgmann does not suggest that we should resist modern water supplies.
But he does prevent us from exaggerating their liberating qualities. And
he urges us to consider how we can replace the lost engagement with nature
and community.
Work and Play
-------------
The labor/leisure distinction peculiar to our day "represents the split of
the technological device into machinery and commodity writ large" (p. 34).
Borgmann wonderfully traces the split's implications for work, whereby
work became a mere means of production. The result was disruption of the
household, the establishment of factories and a proletariat, and the
destruction of village life. The tasks "that once gave the family weight
and structure" were taken over by the machinery of technology, and parents
were reduced to overseeing the consumption of commodities within the home
-- an insufficient basis for earning the child's respect (pp. 137-38).
But the device paradigm is perhaps most vividly displayed in the
complement of work: our use of leisure time. Here the television must
loom large in any account. It "remains the purest, that is, the clearest
and most attenuated, presentation of the promise of technology. It
appears to free us from the fetters of time, space, and ignorance and to
lay before us the riches of the world in their most glamorous form. In
light of this cosmopolitan brilliance, all local and personal
accomplishments must seem crude and homely" (p. 142).
Few take pride in the quality of the television programs they watch.
Further,
We feel uneasiness about our passivity and guilt and sorrow at the loss
of our traditions or alternatives. There is a realization that we are
letting great things and practices drift into oblivion and that
television fails to respond to our best aspirations and fails to engage
the fullness of our powers. These impressions generally agree with
more systematic findings that show television is "not rated
particularly highly as a general way of spending time, and in fact was
evaluated below average compared to other free-time activities." (p.
143)
And yet, we cannot abandon television, because it "embodies too vividly
the dream of which we cannot let go."
It provides a center for our leisure and an authority for the
appreciation of commodities. It is also a palliative that cloaks the
vacuity and relaxes the tension of the technological condition. So it
is normally not enough to reject or constrain television. One must
recognize and reform the larger pattern if one is to reform its center.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Borgmann not only offers as penetrating an analysis of technological
society as I have seen; he also limns as substantial a hope for its reform
as I have ever dared to imagine. I'll take up this side of his thought in
the next issue.
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*** About this newsletter (35 lines)
NETFUTURE is a newsletter and forwarding service dealing with technology
and human responsibility. It is hosted by the UDT Core Programme of the
International Federation of Library Associations. Postings occur roughly
once every week or two. The editor is Steve Talbott, author of "The
Future Does Not Compute: Transcending the Machines in Our Midst" and an
editor at O'Reilly & Associates, book publishers.
You may redistribute this newsletter for noncommercial purposes. You may
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