Holding On to Reality :: Albert Borgmann Philosophy Technology Essays

Holding On to Realityprof and philosopher Albert Borgmann proposes a respectful balance between current technology and the agency it interacts with society in his recent book, Holding on to Reality The temperament of Information at the Turn of the Millennium. Like many technological theorists, Borgmann ponders, the deeper oppugn of whether the recent and imminent flood of information is good for anybody (4). In reaction to this uncertainty, the author devises a theory and ethics of information with the intention of rectifying societys often-troubling birth with science and technology. Borgmanns theory divides information into three distinct parts ground on the way they affect reality - natural information illuminates reality, ethnical information transforms reality, and technological information displaces reality. To take these categories, and how they highlight key developments in information technology, it is important to fuck what the author averages when using the barrie r information. In Borgmanns theory, information is ordered around the relationship between a person, a stigma, and a thing. A person uses his or her intelligence - both(prenominal) native and acquired mental ability - to place a framework of background around a messenger or signal, known as a sign, in order to understand the message, or thing, which is presented to them (38). To provide an illustration remember yourself on the shore of your local beach. As you are putting ware your towel, you notice a trail of deep marks in the sand, stretching a great distance down the shoreline. Since you experience been to the beach before, you know that these marks are footprints. You also know that if these were old footprints, the tide would have washed them away. After a moment of thought, you interpret this trail to mean that other valet de chambre beings are present farther along the beach. In this case, the sign (footprints) communicates to us the presence of a thing (humans). Sin ce the recipient of the sign (you), has the intelligence from previous experience or education to know what footprints are and what happens to them, you are able to place the sign in its proper context, and understand the signal of footprints to mean the presence of human beings. If we could not formulate a relationship between the footprints in the previous example and the presence of human beings, the footprints would be just another piece of formless matter and energy. The meanings we compel out of the signs and messages that we receive are important because they help us to light up sense of our environments, identities, and realities.