this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2025
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Technology is not neutral, and philosophers have known this since the middle of the 20th century. See for example Heidegger, Ellul, Arendt.
Technology makes us relate to the world and others in a distorted way. Instead of speaking to you directly, and see your face and features, I relate to you through pure text... A whole lot of important factors disappear as I do. Compare this then to politics, earth, society, where technology have the same effect
Yes. That's an aspect to keep in mind.
I think distorted is a bit negative. Communication with filters, yes. I see advantages and disadvantages. It really depends on the case. It's technology-bound but not exclusive to the digital age - Letters existed before.
Advantages: asynchronity, time to think and reply. Use of different media. Less stressful because less information to process - there is a reason why video telephony isn't mainstream. Less bias, for all you know I could be Gregor Samsa - you don't see my gender, age, skin, clothing style. just my text. Disadvantages: misunderstandings can become more likely, since you dont know me. It's more time consuming to talk through an issue... and so on.
Would you recommend one specific article or book?
For recommendations you can't go wrong with Martin Heidegger's The Question Concerning Technology. It's a difficult read without previous knowledge of Heidegger's philosophy (or phenomenology), but the essay is so influential that there is plenty of secondary literature on it, from videos to podcasts to texts.
His argument, in essence, is that technology is a way of being that makes everything appear as resources for technology to use. As we become a technological society we see people as "human resources", nature as a depot to be emptied: wind as power, rivers as kinetic energy, the ground as a chest of minerals.
The same phenomenon can also be seen in everything that digital technology does to the persons and society. For example Cambridge Analytica, they are an expression of technology as a way of being, and what they see is untapped resources to be harvested for political gain.
The argument is so influential that Arendt appropriated it to argue that technological/scientific politics will always become self-deluding without actual human intervention. Ellul argued that the technological society becomes self-referential, so that technology creates new issues that we can only solve with technology, which creates new issues (and so on). In the end we become able to do anything... but unable to either stop the cycle or understand what is going on.