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Technology and Culture 42.4 (2001) 776-778



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Book Review

Technology and the Good Life?

Holding On to Reality: The Nature of Information at the Turn of the Millennium


Technology and the Good Life? Edited by Eric Higgs, Andrew Light, and David Strong.Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Pp. xii+392. $65/$25.

Holding On to Reality: The Nature of Information at the Turn of the Millennium. By Albert Borgmann. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Pp. 274. $22.

In 1984, Albert Borgmann published Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life, a book that articulates a rich philosophy of technology by investigating the differences and interplay between "devices" and "focal things." Focal things are the things we build our lives around, things that interweave means and ends and point to the larger natural and cultural contexts of which we are a part, things that call forth skill and attentiveness, that invigorate the life of the individual and the community. By way of contrast, devices divide and fragment our life by separating means from ends, nature from culture, and individual from community. Devices do this by producing titillating but disposable commodities that command only our short-lived attention, and which demand no skill or understanding from us. Though humanity has derived undeniable practical benefits from the "device paradigm," Borgmann argues that we cannot look to it as a means of coming into contact with the richer experiences of life that have enduring meaning for us. In the end, Borgmann challenges us to think about the nature of the good life--in an existential sense--in light of his analysis of technology.

Technology and the Good Life? explicitly takes up this challenge, and in doing so it pays tribute to the force and influence of Borgmann's work. The editors praise Borgmann's expansive view of the philosophy of technology, the richness of his phenomenological descriptions, the depth and breadth of the diagnosis he builds upon these descriptions, his focus on how technology affects various existential relationships, and his efforts to formulate and publicly disseminate proposals for reform. The central theme of the [End Page 776] volume, however, is an exploration and extension of Borgmann's inquiry into the good life, and how it intersects with technology.

Most of the seventeen essays are by philosophers of technology, though the disciplines of anthropology, education, environmental studies, and economics are also represented. The essays are divided into four sections, each of which takes up different aspects of Borgmann's thought as expressed in Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life and in Crossing the Postmodern Divide (1992). Part 1 summarizes Borgmann's philosophy and offers a brief history and report on the current state of the philosophy of technology. Part 2 presents both sympathetic and critical evaluations of Borgmann's work on its own terms, and considers its implications for the field as a whole. Part 3 takes up his device paradigm and extends its application to new fields of experience that he did not originally consider. Part 4 critically probes the foundation of Borgmann's philosophy of technology and challenges at a fundamental level the orthodox meaning of focal things and practices.

The volume ends with a postscript featuring Borgmann's detailed response to his philosophically diverse commentators. Despite some sharp differences with some of his critics, he graciously devotes the closing sections of his essay to delineating the broad areas of agreement among philosophers of technology, and he eloquently offers a general outline of a program to move these various critiques of technology from the philosophical margins and toward a wider audience. Thus, Technology and the Good Life? is more than a critical study of Borgmann's work, or a history of the philosophy of technology as it grew out of the postwar years and coalesced into a definable area of study in the 1970s. It is also a dialogical manifesto meant to reinvigorate the field and give it a fruitful direction.

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