The phenomenology of technology: A theoretical exploration of the relationship between technological medium and experience.

摘要

This dissertation conducted a theoretical study of technology based on the work of Marshal McLuhan, Michel Foucault, and Martin Heidegger, with the goal of analyzing the relationship between human experience and technological mediums, such as television, computers, telephones and books.; McLuhan, Heidegger and Foucault all understand technology's major effects as experiential, rather than physical. Phenomenological terminology (such as embodiment, dasein, life-world, clearing, and horizon) is useful for describing technology's effects on the human mind. Phenomenology approaches the experiential world we live in---the life world---in a integrative manner exploring many levels simultaneously: embodied (sensory), psychological, social, and philosophical; this method diminishes the Cartesian subject-object split. From the diverse technological life-world three core mediums were identified: the spoken, the textual, and the electronic. The spoken relates to the auditory experience, the textual to the visual, and the electronic to embodied experience. Specific technological media have been explored in the sense in which they mainly operate: for example, the telephone in the spoken, the book in the textual, and the television in the electronic.; Each core technology operates in a specific and unique experiential space, its phenomenological clearing (the conscious aspects of cultures and individuals). The core technologies are archetypal because they foster and maintain specific worldviews (paradigms): the spoken with traditional/archaic, the textual with modernity, and the electronic with post-modernity.; Technology's automatic and subliminal influence on the senses are more important than its manifest content, these processes are equal to a technological unconscious. The content of technology is always oriented toward something other than itself, hereby; the processes of the medium remain invisible in the individual and cultural clearing.; Electronic technology introduces a paradigm requiring new terminology to be described. The experiential (the personal and collective psyche), the landscape of consciousness and the decentered (egoless experience) are used to describe the phenomenological reality when the subject-object, or ego-self axis, is diffused. McLuhan's term "global village" illustrates the embodied identity and interpersonal focus of the electronic village, while also alluding to the dissolution of space occurring with the global reach of electronic technology.