Phenomenology of Technology

There can be no doubt that technology has its own agenda, it's own imperatives and entailments. These are embedded in, but distinct from, other forces at work -- in opposition to and in alliance with technology.

"Reading" these imperatives is very much the work of the futurist, the marketer and the strategic technologist, as well as the philosopher.

It it ultimately the philosopher who -- though he cannot create the world -- nevertheless establishes the rudiments of discourse used by those who do and will (create a world).

With the technology of computer networks comes a world. By "world" I mean the sense in which Heidegger used it; as in 'worldhood'; an existentiale, an explicatum of Dasein's existence-structure -- a characteristic of Dasein itself, and not those things which Dasein is not. Now, Heidegger had his analytic of technology, as summarized in The Question Concerning Technology, but I'm not here concerned with 'the essence of technology, per se,' but rather with its appearance in our world, as something that conditions it -- affects its shape, its distance, its contemporaneity and the like.

Technology is unique, insofar as it changes not only the ontical 'content' of Dasein's world (the things that occur in and constitute our everyday world), but the ontological structure of Dasein itself. It is something that not only occurs within the given, but is constitutent of, Being-in-the-World -- it is a given and has always been an existentiale of Dasein -- as long as we've had hands and eyes.

So, if technology is reflexively-ontological (both an ontical fact and a condition for what is ready-to-hand), technology concerned with media is doubly reflexive.

And here we come again to the phenomenon (in a less than phenomenological sense) of the internet.

An "internet of things," for example, exists in a concrete and physical sense, as well as in an abstract and virtual one. It is locates itself both physical space and media 'space,' making ordinary physical things amenable to analysis and manipulation as objects in relation to other real and virtual objects.