Insistent emplacement: Heidegger on the technologies of informing

I To get us under way, consider a now familiar image: the manager who has his/her secretary print out his/her e-mails and stack them high for subsequent perusal. Not quite apocryphal enough, this practice – the source of many cartoons and much “back stage” grumbling – expresses a not-so-subtle judgement about information technology. We suppose that it breaks roughly into two distinct elements. The first is a suspicion about the quality of what is communicated. Much of it is thought to be trivial, narrow in its content or simply superfluous and counter-productive to ordinary thinking: in short, inessential. It takes time, after all, to say anything worthwhile, and by its very nature information technology inverts our sense of the temporal. The second is what might be called a mis-attunement to technology. The medium itself feels wrong, strangely inauthentic, perhaps because it seems to require so little effort. It is not the means by which great oratory is heard, certainly, but more than this there is a sense of risking disruption, of falling foul of poor mediation, that makes information technology seem a weak substitute for the handwritten word or conversation. And one can almost audibly hear these beliefs hardening in response to the recent spectacle of the Hollywood movie star who faced down poor reviews with the claim that, in his milieu, the Internet, and not professional film critics, was the prime source for instant, accurate information. Instantaneity corrupts or distracts, then? Or simply speeds without direction? We are up against a well-worn diagnosis for modern times, one whose origins are entirely coeval with the passage to modernity itself. As Thoreau has it during the mid-nineteenth century: