What Things Do
Dan Saffer, whose excellent book about interaction design I recently read for reasons related to my day job/life, has posted a seven-part review of Peter-Paul Verbeek's What Things Do: Philosophical Reflections on Technology, Agency, And Design, a book I bought a while back but haven't yet gotten around to reading. Saffer begins his review:
What Things Do sets out to establish a new way of thinking about the role objects play in human life and activities, and what effect objects have on human existence. To do this, the author Peter-Paul Verbeek, begins by looking at how several philosophers have thought about this issue in the past. He starts with Karl Jaspers' existential approach to technology.
Jaspers take on technology can be boiled down to this: technology alienates people from their "authentically human" selves, turning them (us) into accessories of mass culture. As Verbeek describes it: "technology suffocates human existence." Although technology for Jaspers is seen as neutral (more on this in a second), the byproduct of technology plus population growth, is to turn human beings into cogs in a vast machine. The human race is utterly dependent on technology now to survive, and to maintain that technology is a tremendous burden. Technology creates more needs than it fulfills, and simply the operation and maintenance of the machines that keep us alive requires huge organizations and extensive bureaucracies. "Everything must be planned and coordinated with everything else," Verbeek writes. "The tightly organized society that results, according to Jaspers, itself has the character of a machine." Jaspers calls this technological society (that is, the world we live in now) "The Apparatus" and it "increasingly determines how human beings carry out their daily lives." Human beings stop becoming individuals, but are instead interchangeable parts in The Apparatus.
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