The Technologian

Abstract

While reading Thomas L. Friedman’s description of how he exclaimed to his wife “I’m going to write a book called The World Is Flat,” I could hear in my mind Martin Heidegger retorting, “The worldview is flat.” In the book he did write, Friedman considers the flattening of the world to be a phase of globalization that began with the fall of the Berlin Wall. In Heidegger’s work The Age of the World Picture there is no mention of “globalization” as such. Yet the essay does describe how a confrontation of worldviews results in the “flattening” of objectivity. This paper will demonstrate how Friedman’s notion of globalization as the levelling of the economic playing field brought about by technological change is consistent with Heidegger’s metaphysical notion of a confrontation of worldviews. It will also propose that our current age of globalization, although markedly different from Heidegger’s age of world picture, represents a metaphysical shift anticipated by him. Finally, it will suggest that reflection on the different metaphysical groundings of the medieval, modern and postmodern ages reveals a technological spectrum that begins with the mythology of creation and ends with the ideology of globalization. Continue reading →

I presented a paper entitled “I Ping the Body Cybernetic: Wearable Computing and Medical Diagnostics” on November 4th, 2004, at the Technology and the Body Conference held at the Canada Science and Technology Museum, Ottawa, Canada. The Introduction follows:

I Sing the Body Electric;
The bodies of men and women engirth me, and I engirth them;
They will not let me off nor I them till I go with them and
respond to them and love them.
Walt Whitman (1819–1892).  Leaves of Grass.

In the past decade the miniaturization of digital hardware and the proliferation of wireless communications have led to portable computing products that are networked. This trend, combined with the practice of storing patient medical records in computerized databases, has led to research projects that utilize wearable computing for continuous medical diagnostics, such as devices for diabetics that monitor blood glucose levels over the Internet. Developers of these technologies claim that they enable patients to gain autonomy within the health care system and empower them to take greater responsibility for the decisions that govern their health. However, when humans are inserted into a cybernetic feedback loop that reduces their health determinants to medical data they may find that their virtual bodies displace their social bodies and that they are further alienated from, rather than integrated into, decision-making within the health care system.

The paper can be downloaded here.