Throughout its brief history the philosophy of technology has been largely concerned with the debate over the nature of technology. Typically, technology has been viewed as being essentially another term for applied science, the practical application of scientific theory to the material world. In recent years philosophers and cultural critics have characterised technology in a far more problematic fashion, as an authoritarian power with the ability to bring about far-reaching cultural, political and ecological effects. Proponents of the former view are (...) often termed instrumentalists and those of the latter technological determinists. The debate between them revolves around the question of the fact/value distinction, namely whether technology can be deemed to be value-neutral. I argue that employing a phenomenological approach to technology grants us a fresh perspective on the instrumentalism-determinism debate. It enables us to recast the instrumentalist/determinist debate as a debate between technological idealism and materialism, and to ground the instrumentalist and determinist positions in different experiential relations to technology. It also gives us a better grasp of the function of the different critiques of technology, with idealists concerned primarily with the misapplication of technology as a form of knowledge, and materialists with the existential implications of concrete technological relations. (shrink)

Blending social analysis and philosophy, Albert Borgmann maintains that technology creates a controlling pattern in our lives.

Philosophy of technology was not initially considered a consolidated field of inquiry. However, under the influence of sociology and pragmatist philosophy, something resembling a consensus has emerged in a field previously marked by a lack of agreement amongst its practitioners. This has given the field a greater sense of structure and yielded interesting research. However, the loss of the earlier “messy” state has resulted in a limitation of the field’s scope and methodology that precludes an encompassing view of the problematic (...) issues inherent in the question of technology. It is argued that the heterodox disunity and diversity of earlier philosophy of technology was not a mark of theoretical immaturity but was necessitated by the field’s complex subject matter. It is further argued that philosophy of technology should return to its pluralistic role as a meta-analytical structure linking insights from different fields of research. (shrink)

AbeBooks.com: The Technological Society.

The great ideological cliché of our time, César Rendueles argues in Sociophobia, is the idea that communication technologies can support positive social dynamics and improve economic and political conditions. We would like to believe that the Internet has given us the tools to overcome modernity's practical dilemmas and bring us into closer relation, but recent events show how technology has in fact driven us farther apart. Named one of the ten best books of the year by Babelia El País, Sociophobia (...) looks at the root causes of neoliberal utopia's modern collapse. It begins by questioning the cyber-fetishist dogma that lulls us into thinking our passive relationship with technology plays a positive role in resolving longstanding differences. Rendueles claims that the World Wide Web has produced a diminished rather than augmented social reality. In other words, it has lowered our expectations with respect to political interventions and personal relations. In an effort to correct this trend, Rendueles embarks on an ambitious reassessment of our antagonistic political traditions to prove that post-capitalism is not only a feasible, intimate, and friendly system to strive for but also essential for moving past consumerism and political malaise. (shrink)

Though we would expect the revelation of the Facebook emotional manipulation study to have had a negative impact on Facebook, its number of active users only continues to grow. As this is precisely the result that Jacques Ellul would have predicted, this paper examines his philosophy of technology in order to investigate the relationship between Facebook and its users and what this relationship means in terms of autonomy. That Facebook can manipulate its users without losing users reveals that Facebook’s autonomy (...) is growing while the autonomy of users is diminishing. The paper concludes by showing that the answer to this increasingly asymmetrical relationship cannot be the creation of review boards and oversight committees as the underlying issues concerning autonomy are existential more than they are ethical. (shrink)