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Selves, Things, and the Internet

Dr. Dennis M. Weiss

York College of Pennsylvania

I. So who am I really? Albert Borgmann on personal identity in the age of the Internet

A.I. and Society, February 2013, Special Issue: 25th Anniversary Volume - A Faustian Exchange: What is to be

Human in the Era of Ubiquitous Technology?

What I want to show is that the Internet has settled on reality like a glamorous fog that has globally dissolved the

contours of space, time, and people and at the time same time condenses locally into brilliant if flat images of a

place, a time, or a person.

Borgmanns analysis of personal identity in the age of the Internet combines key ideas from his seminal texts:

Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life (1984) and the distinction between devices and things:o Devices dissolve the coherent and engaging character of the pretechnological world of things. In a

device, the relatedness of the world is replaced by machinery, but the machinery is concealed, and the

commodities, which are made available by a device, are enjoyed without the encumbrance of or the

engagement with a context.

o A focal thing is something that has a commanding presence, engages your body and mind, and engagesyou with others. Focal things and the kinds of engagements they foster have the power to center your

life, and to arrange all other things around this center in an orderly way because you know whatsimportant and whats not. A focal practice results from committed engagement with the focal thing.

(On Taming Technology)

Holding On to Reality (1999)o Virtuality spreads a fog of virtual confusion and blurs the shape of things and events with glamour and

triviality (191).

II. The puzzle of Borgmanns analysis

Borgmanns 2013 analysis of personal identity in the age ofthe Internet remains unchanged from his account in

1999. And yet, much has changed in our thinking about the Internet since then.

The story of Web 1.0: 19841999 and demassification

In their 1994 preamble to Cyberspace and the American Dream: A Magna Carta for the KnowledgeAge, (1994): The central event of the 20th century is the overthrow of matter. In technology,

economics, and the politics of nations, wealthin the form of physical resourceshas been losing

value and significance. The powers of mind are everywhere ascendant over the brute force of things.

(Esther Dyson, George Gilder, and George Keyworth)

Mark Poster and the Mode of Information: My general thesis is that the mode of information enacts aradical reconfiguration of language, one which constitutes subjects outside the pattern of the rational,

autonomous individual. This familiar modern subject is displaced by the mode of information in favor

of one that is multiplied, disseminated and decentered, continuously interpellated as an unstable

identity (The Second Media Age, 57).

The story of Web 2.0: 1999/2000 and materiality makes a comeback

The failure of Y2K and the explosion of reality television Object-oriented philosophy is officially coined by Graham Harman in his 1999 doctoral dissertation

Tool-Being: Elements in a Theory of Objects.

The Internet of Things: proposed by Kevin Ashton in 1999 Critical Inquirys special issue Thing Theory is published in 2001 Sherry Turkle recants:Alone Together(2012)

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III. Peter-Paul Verbeek, Morali zing Technology(2011): humans shape things and things shape humans and

subjectivity is co-constituted in relation to technology

Recognizing that humans and technologies do not have separate existences anymore but help to shape each other in

myriad ways and that the humanist foundation of ethics needs to be broadened to account for the technological and

moral mediation of artifacts, Verbeek develops a post-phenomenological philosophy of technology and a

nonhumanist ethics of technology. Technologies play an actively mediating role in the relationship between human

beings and reality (7).

Verbeek argues that much of philosophy of technology is still held captive by a modernist metaphysics that

insists on the separation of subjects from objects, humans from artifacts, and portrays technology as a largely

external and often negative and dehumanizing force. This mistaken metaphysics makes it impossible to properly

discern the interrelatedness and interconnectedness of subject and objectof humankind and technology (Verbeek:

Philosophy of Man). We must, Verbeek argues, shape our existence in relation to the anthropotechnologies that

help to shape how we experience the world and live our lives (37).

IV.Jane Bennett, Vibrant M atter(2010): encounters with lively matter can reshape the self and its interests

and give rise to selves who live as earth

Bennett wants to cultivate our embeddedness in a natural-cultural-technological assemblage and to enhance our

awareness of the vitality of the world with which we are enmeshed. Thing-power materialism offers a contestablebut, I think, auspicious account of how it is that things have the power to move humansIt emphasizes the shared

material basis, the kinship, of all things, regardless of their status as human, animal, vegetable, or mineral. It does

not deny that there are differences between human and nonhuman, though it strives to describe them without

succumbing to the temptation to place humans at the ontological center. One way to do so is to distinguish humans

as things composed of a particularly rich and complex collection of materiality (The Force of Things, 359).

Bennett pushes more in the direction of things than does Verbeek, opening her analysis not only to designed,

technical artifacts but to minerals and metals, trash, nature, food, and microbes. And she seeks a more radical

displacement of human subjectivity that requires that we rethink action and responsibility, blame and moral

responsibility and intentionality (31). Human agency is always an assemblage of microbes, animals, plants, metals,

chemicals, word-sounds, and the like (120)

V. Selves, things, and the Internet: taking stock of some key issues

whether a philosophy of technological mediation takes seriously enough the very radical character of the(fractious) kinship between the human and the nonhuman (Bennett).

whether a philosophy of vibrant matter takes seriously enough technological mediation. whether we should privilege relations or objects/things (or pursue a both/and strategy) whether we should so readily elide the distinction between subject and object, human and thing/technology whether these theoretical approaches take seriously enough the kinds of selves that are appropriate to

human lives

One final approach to objects and relations: Feminist Object Relations Theory (Jane Flax)

Psychoanalysis, especially object relations theory, is a crucial tool for feminist philosophy. Its contentrepresents a systematic attempt to understand human nature as the product of social relations in interaction

with biology.The most basic tenet of object relations theory is that human beings are created in and

through relations with other human beings. (Political Philosophy and the Patriarchal Unconscious)