ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an existential account of our current technological age, the digital age, through Martin Heidegger’s descriptions of human existence and the essence of modern technology. Heidegger understands human existence as a series of projects that we accomplish in the world through tools—an insight that binds our existence to technology. In the digital age, technology permeates our being-in-the-world. There is no longer a strong division between life online and life off-line as digital technology becomes a more pervasive part of everything we do. Heidegger’s concerns over modern technology’s drive to calculate and control have become more relevant during the digital age, which is characterized by the computerization of culture and transposition of everything into numerical data. This chapter explains the dangers of the digital age and why our relationship to technology requires existential analysis.
