Publication date:
04 August 2017Length of book:
176 pagesPublisher
Lexington BooksISBN-13: 9781498549530
The world we make reflects the way reality is perceived, and today the world is perceived primarily in technological terms. So argues Gil Germain in Thinking About Technology: How the Technological Mind Misreads Reality. Given the connection between perception and action, or thinking and doing, Germain first highlights the central features of technological worldview to better understand the contemporary drive to master the conditions of human existence. He then boldly proposes that the technological worldview seriously misreads the nature of the world it seeks mastery over, and shows how this misinterpretation invariably leads to the technologically-related challenges currently vexing the contemporary social order, from the drift toward a posthuman future to the anti-globalization backlash. Germain closes Thinking About Technology by articulating an alternative worldview to the technological perspective and illustrating how this re-reading of reality might help us inhabit the technological landscape in ways better attuned to the human condition.
Unlike many recent books about the impacts of technology, this monograph is not concerned with teasing out the implications of genetic engineering, nanomaterials, or other powerful new technologies. It does not rehearse familiar wholesale judgments of utopian or dystopian futures driven by technologies. Germain’s concern is with the modern world view or mind-set. How might this mind-set skew our understanding of the world and what it is to be human? Germain's ambitious "goal is not to think within the parameters of technological thought but to situate oneself in a position where it is possible to ... assess [technology's] limits and possibilities." He draws from a rich array of writers, notably Plato and French cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard, in developing a critical perspective on the technological mind-set and its limits and unacknowledged assumptions. Germain (political thought, Univ. of Prince Edward Island, Canada) urges a “skeptical attitude,” questioning or doubting the conviction that technology must determine our fate; instead, he embraces tension, yearning, and eros as replacements…. [T] he book ends with a list of concrete and plausible recommendations for acting in "a world with limits." Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers.