ABSTRACT
It might be said that a number of the central contentions of this booknotably that the impact of technology on culture over the past half-century or so goes far beyond the actual “use” of technology, and that the best way to frame such changes is to in some way retrace the separation of technicity from knowledge and language in early Greek culture-are largely a continuation of Martin Heidegger’s writings on technology. Indeed, one might say that these concerns became the dominant themes of Heidegger’s work, beginning from at least as early as the 1938 essay “The Age of the World Picture” and continuing into the 1950s wherein the “threat” posed by technology to a number of cultural processes becomes a central part of Heidegger’s re flections on the possible futures of democracy, philosophy, and of “humankind” as a whole. Although critiques of Heidegger’s work on these subjects have often positioned his conflation of material technologies with conceptual or interpretive frameworks-that there is something like a “technological worldview” that is in excess of our material use of technologiesas a weakness, we might today instead see this as its strength: Heidegger’s insistence that “the essence of technology” transcends its “mere external forms” to radically reorganize capacities for human communication, the synchronicity or co-temporality of global culture, and humans’ ability to destroy their natural environment can look like quite a prescient one when viewed retrospectively from an era marked by the ubiquity of “information technology,” economic and cultural globalization, and an increasing dread over the ecological devastation caused by human industry (“What” 112).
