Thinking about Technology: How the Technological Mind Misreads Reality by Gil Germain (review)
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Thinking about Technology: How the Technological Mind Misreads Realityby Gil Germain
This is an unpretentious book in nine concise chapters that grew out of a series of lectures for a large undergraduate general education class. It aims to restate what has been called a humanities criticism of technology, drawing especially of the work of Jean Baudrillard. The author is professor of political thought at the University of Prince Edward Island, Canada.
Chapter 1 begins with interpretative readings of Plato's Phaedrusand [End Page 343]the contemporary novelist George Saunders's short story "Jon" in order to call attention to cultural dissatisfactions with a technological worldview. The thesis is that there is a fundamental difference between an erotic engagement with the world as a whole and technological mediation. "Ultimately, thinking about technology is an exercise in reflecting on eros" (p. 21).
Chapters 2 and 3 use technological romanticists such as Ray Kurzweil and Kevin Kelly to illustrate the ethos and problem with technology. This ethos is presented as failing to recognize how instrumentalist attractions delimit human experience. "With modernity, life has been refigured as a solvable problem. Ours aspires to be a tragedy-free age" (p. 31).
Chapters 4 and 5 offer expositions and interpretations of Baudrillard to try to drive home the argument so far. These are the least successful chapters, since they try to explain what the author admits from the start can be difficult to understand with the thought of a French theorist who is at least equally difficult to read.
Chapters 7 and 8 suggest alternatives to technological thinking. A final chapter 9 summarizes. "The goal [of this book] was to look at the phenomenon called technology as it we were not part of the thing under examination [in order] to loosen the hold of our imagination of ingrained perceptions regarding what technology is and does [and thus] gain a better sense of the true import of our civilizational commitment to the technological ideal" (p. 143).
Despite modest strengths, this book insufficiently acknowledges, as alternatives to Kuzweil and Kelly, more nuanced accounts of technological experience. Asides on how the author is making his argument can also distract from the argument itself.
Carl Mitcham is international professor of philosophy of technology at Renmin University of China in Beijing. His most recent book is Philosophy of Engineering, East and West(2018).
