Abstract
Technology is inextricably woven into the social and cultural fabric of different cultures. Tool use technologies, created and used by our pre-sapiens relatives, preceded us by more than a million years. There are no human cultures that are pre-technological. All humans have a material culture with complexly patterned praxes involving artifacts; we have only recently begun to appreciate the completely of even what may be called technologically mediated cultures. Technologies either magnify or amplify human experiences and can change the ways we live. This non-neutral, transformative power of humans enhanced by technologies is essential feature of the human–technology relations. Technologies are the extension of our bodies. The technological form of life is part and parcel of culture, just as culture in the human sense inevitably implies technologies. Every technology, as a word, has a signifier and a meaning. The signifier can be seen as the hardware of the technology, while the meaning can be conceived of as the uses and the functions that the technology performs. However, a technology, like many words, tends to be ambiguous, that is its meaning is mutable. As a consequence, in order to make sense, a technology calls for a cultural context where to be embedded. In this essay, I will demonstrate how this relationship can be articulated and their main theoretical implications for the study of new technologies give rise to ethics.
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Notes
Ernst Kapp published his work “Grundlinien einer Philosophie der Technik: Zur Entstehungsgeschichte der Kultur aus neuen Geschtespunkten [Fundamentals of a philosophy of technology: the genesis of culture from a new perspective] in 1877.
American philosopher, John Dewey, saw technologies and technological thinking as an instrumental means for social improvement and the dissemination of democracy.
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The paper was developed while working as a Project Fellow at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Mandi, Himachal Pradesh India.
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Tripathi, A.K. Postphenomenological investigations of technological experience. AI & Soc 30, 199–205 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-014-0575-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-014-0575-2