When the internet doesn't work

For Heidegger, technology becomes transparent to our consciousness when it works as it should. "The tool or equipment -- in use -- becomes the means, not the object, of the experience" (Ihde, 32). Of course, we start to notice technology when it doesn't work right. This may seem obvious, but let us take the internet as an example.

When the internet doesn't work right, Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) gets upset, and it is not good to upset senators. He explains the problem "I, just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday."

Later in his speech (which took place in a regulatory meeting about an ISP throttling VOIP packets), he gives his now famous description of how the internet works:

They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a truck.

It's a series of tubes.

And if you don't understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.

So, remember, when the internet is going slow, it's because its tubes are being filled by people who download ten movies.

Thanks, Sen. Stevens, now I know how the internet works.

Blog #4 Technology And The Lifeworld

Ihde starts the chapter by first telling us how a life or world without technology must be a imaginative world that is non-existent. Ihde uses three well known philosophers and some of their more famous examples such as Heidegger's Hammer example is a typical workshop example that Heidegger was known for. This example puts the hammer a basic tool into a surrounding environment and from there he applies his knowledge of phenomenology. In Husserl's Galileo he uses the examples of two worlds the bodily one were we live and the new one in which he uses much geometry and looks at a prescientific life world. The last and final example that Ihde uses is Merleau-Ponty's Feather were Ponty talks about the use of material and how it can extend our existing bodies through perception which Ponty speaks of, through what he calls "embodiment relations". In the end I believe that these philosophers all see the big picture that technology is a way of our life and without it life would almost certainly be non-existent.