Philosophical Pragmatism and the Challenges of Information Technologies

i am deeply honored to be with you today in Florida. Thank you so much for coming, for your membership, for your friendship. Thank you to everyone who put this meeting together—our local host Ryan Musgrave, and all at Rollins College who made us feel so welcome here. Thanks, also, to our Program Committee, Barbara Lowe and Anthony Neal; our communications director, Dan Brunson; our secretary, Dwayne Tunstall; our treasurer, Bill Myers; to our Board; and to President-Elect Steve Fesmire. A lot went into making this meeting happen.

It’s good to be back together. One thing the pandemic has done by separating us is cause us to reflect on what being together means—for friendship, for communication, for community—for imbibing, todos juntos. The pandemic forced us out of our comfort zones, and made us find new ways to connect. But these innovations, in my estimation, do not substitute for face to face. We need to continue to investigate why this is, especially as we try to find ways to mix old and new ways of carrying on as intellectuals.

During the pandemic, I lost steam; maybe it was being in a state of near-constant worry. Maybe it was the political climate. But something happened to me that had never happened before. An existential “befuddlement” (is that the word?), the loss of a horizon, a sense of now and later, here and there. I felt lost at sea. Unlike some who snuggled into their libraries and reread the collected works of Hegel or Royce or the Upanishads... I couldn’t work on philosophy. I had nothing to say—no desire to even read. I felt bereft. Ideas that sustained me, which I proselytized to others—rang hollow. What have I been doing? What will I do?

But teaching keeps the nose to the grindstone, the shoulder to the wheel. Act like you believe, Pascal said, and you may yet, someday. Yeah, right, Pascal. (And you, too, William James.) But I have to admit, they were right. Teaching classes—the meaning of life, philosophy of technology, aesthetics—kept my compass needle in motion. And it kept swinging back to what we (sometimes, with some disgruntlement) call Pragmatism.

This approach has what I need. Pragmatism as looking forward: proleptically, instrumentally, with ideas and theories as tools, looking forward to consider the meanings of future goals—and then organizing backwards. Moving in time, from present to future and back again. Moving in reality, from concrete to abstract and back again. Pragmatism as looking from side to side: democratically, pluralistically, looking at those who have been around us all the time but not fully appreciated, not fully visible, or all too visible—because overexposed. Pragmatism as looking more closely: phenomenologically, radically empirically, slowing down, moving closer, then backing away. Inspecting experience, its structures, its flow, its journey, its history.

Still, I wondered, pragmatism ... for what? I recognized that pragmatism lent itself as an aid for making sense of the pandemic, helping me to develop themes that I’d already been thinking about. Themes about technology, experience, inquiry, and democracy.

What I would like to do, then, for the rest of this talk, is relate what caught and held my attention, philosophically, pragmatically. Especially on the theme of what is happening for us and, even more, to us—the impact of recent technologies on our experience, our ways of inquiring, with both education and democracy hanging in the balance. I’m offering no final thoughts about anything. Just what’s been keeping me up at night.

The Technological Situation

Where do we find ourselves, in 2022? As we all know, we are increasingly enmeshed in a growing network of information-oriented tools, systems, and techniques. Smartphones, transportation apps, learning thermostats, location trackers, on and on. The benefits of these devices is usually foremost in our minds; after all, it is the job of marketers to be sure we know why we need something more. The downsides are also familiar to most of us—we fight interruption, distraction, information overload, and the fear of missing a notification or...