Humanities and Telecommunication :: Technology Marx Heidegger Papers

Humanities and TelecommunicationContemporary engine room in the frame of electronically managed interactive telecommunications is compatible with the goals and determine of the humanities. For Marx, machine-work tended toward organism mechanically routine, repetitive, deskilled, and trivialized. In the case of discourse, the identical critique has been made of calculatorized communication. instancy is not authorial presence, but the experience of textuality that is maximized by participation in interactive communication. Bulletin board engineering inverts the relationship between the breaker point of communicative interaction and the number of communicants. It is both mass communication and secernate participation. From the point of view of a theory of discourse, the bulletin board constitution is unique in that the ratio between the number of participants and the individualized character of the interaction is directly proportional. One persons voice does not inhibit or rep ress the voice of another. It is the technological embodiment of the ideal speech internet site of Habermas which allows for the maximum of democratic participation and which, by allowing everyone to have a voice, allows for the superior amount of dissensus and dialectic. The thesis of this paper is that contemporary technology in the form of digital information, natural language processing, cybernetics, and particularly interactive telecommunications is compatible with the goals and values of the humanities. There has been, however, the criticism that technology is dehumanizing. We will consider and respond to this criticism in light of the thought of Marx, Marcuse, Lyotard and Heidegger. Only a few age ago the connotations surrounding the terms philosophy and computers were incongruous. One reason for this was the association of computer technology with mathematical computation and the manipulation of symbols in formal programing languages. Since most of us do not use computer s for number crunching or programming, but for word processing, text processing, and communication, this incongruity has diminished.The concrete instance of this technology that the paper considers is the electronic bulletin board. A user calling into an electronic bulletin board can read and enter messages, upload and transfer files. The messages are usually divided into conferences or discussion groups where messages are listed agree to subject matter, date, sender and receiver. The message log is also a searchable database with which multiple discussion threads can be followed. One major(ip) technological advantage of the bulletin board is the liberation from the constraints of time and space. Parties to a communication do not need to be at the same location or present at the same time.