Technical activity automatically eliminates every nontechnical activity or transforms it into technical activity. This does not mean, however, that there is any conscious effort or directive will. Jacques Ellul
Thursday, January 24, 2008
Information as a reality
Is information as a reality really taking over the other two types of reality? I can relate to Borgman's out in the wilderness idea. I live in Perryville, Arkansas at the Heifer Ranch this summer, where there was no television, and the most access I had to a computer was about once a week. Its a totally different world. You get to focus more on information about reality than information being a reality. Now back to the main question I do not exactly believe that information as a reality is taking the other two types of information over, however I do believe it is making the other two types harder to come by. If people can just axis information from their television, computer, ipod, or whatever cool new device they have, one starts to wonder if they would ever feel the need to go out and exactly experience anything for themselves anymore. I still value the outdoors and actually playing my own music because I feel the other ways of getting this information loses a lot in this process. No matter high tech the ways of getting this information become they will still lose something because you are not actually physically experiencing this information.
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Borgmann would certainly agree with your comment that the worlds of nature (and culture)are "totally different" from the world of "information as reality." And your experience of living without television or access to a computer is just the sort of thing he recommends as a form of resistance to the culture of information as reality.
Borgmann's idea isn't that the other two worlds have ceased to exist. Rather, he argues that our collective way of life is increasingly oriented around "information as reality" rather than about or for it, and that this state of affairs is morally repugnant.
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