Heidegger and Verbeek (Rebecca, Laurence, Andrea and Carina)

The readings discuss technology or technological objects as playing a more meaningful role in our everyday life than we, as humans, understand it to be. Technology’s role in society has become more than words and ideas but a material thing that relays an entire lifestyle; an identity. Techne, or the skill related to the arts and crafts has evolved from the creation of a craft by hand to the creation of a technology through a technology, or in other words, through an object or barrier connecting the “product” with the hands. Regarding this subject, the readings argue that “[…] Changes in our material world is a loss of authenticity” (see Verbeek, 2). If one creates the design and scenario as sketches of brainstorming, but the final product is created through technology to become a modern day craft (i.e. another technology), is this still authentic? Or must each individual use their hands (and perhaps other body parts) so as to have an authentic creation?

The readings also bring rise to the question concerning the individuality of a person in terms of their intimate relationship with technology. Are we like machines and is technology “alienating human beings from themselves and reality”? These questions derive from empirical studies, and so its challenge is to “understand technology not in terms of its conditions of possibility, but in terms of concrete artifacts”. In terms of the previous question, the example; the process of turning on a computer is an auto-pilot function in the human brain (so to speak), and although our movements during this process may at times seem mechanical, we are in no way the machine.

Essentially, technology is more than an object you kick out of frustration or throw away when its usefulness is at an end. There is more to considering the aspect of technology; we need to understand it as a practice (i.e. how people work concretely with things – the human experience).

Heidegger also discusses the aspect of technology revealing itself; as in technology as the tool or cause coming into being with itself, i.e. the process of appearing to us, which in Heidegger’s understanding is not a human activity. The essence of technology is not something technological. This aspect of the readings can be understood from the example of the tree (Verbeek, 49-95).