Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life: A Philosophical Inquiry (1984) is a work in the philosophy of technology. It introduces the device paradigm, a pattern for how technology shapes our lives, and the concept of focal things and practices, as an alternative to the device paradigm. This work defines the device paradigm as a pattern in which technological devices produce commodities. Both words are used in new senses, defined within the work: A commodity is something we receive from a device with very little effort on our part, like recorded music or heat from a central heating system. Commodities come from devices, machines that produce them but simultaneously obscure where these things come from.
The device paradigm is contrasted with focal things and practices, also defined in the book. Unlike commodities, focal things require effort and skill to produce, like music played on a musical instrument or the warmth of a hearth. Because focal practices take skill, those who participate in them experience the focal things produced by them more richly than the commodities offered by the device paradigm.
While there is a place in modern society for the device paradigm, the book argues, it has become so pervasive that it displaces focal things and practices from most of our lives. Since focal things and practices guide us into the good life, we should work both as individuals and a society to recognize the value of them and preserve a place for them, using technology to support rather than supplant them.
The book was written by Albert Borgmann. Borgmann was a German-born American philosopher specializing in the philosophy of technology, and was a professor of philosophy at the University of Montana. Borgmann's device paradigm extends mid-century modern philosophical inquiries into the nature of technology including Heidegger's notion of Gestell (enframing) and Jacques Ellul's Technique (technology as a dominating force in the world). The book explores the limitations of conventional ways of thinking about technology and its social context, both liberal democratic ideals, and Marxist lines of thought, concluding with a call for the reform of technology and the device paradigm via focal things and practices.
Like much work in the philosophy of technology, the work tends to remain on the sidelines of thought. Philosophers of technology generally acknowledge the pattern, but some argue that the pattern is not as pervasive as Borgmann claims. For example, rather than displacing human social connection, women use telephones to maintain and build narrative and tradition and capitalism is another force beyond the device paradigm that shapes our lives.
Outline Borgmann's text has a three part approach: Part 1 deals with terminological and philosophical starting points, Part 2 with Borgmann's original theory of technology (the device paradigm), and Part 3 with focal things and practices.
Part 1 Chapter 1, “Technology and Theory,” takes a cursory glance at Borgmann's main thesis: there is a pattern that can be detected in how we currently relate to technology. This pattern constitutes a paradigm that understands technology mainly in terms of devices, thus the “device paradigm.” Our seeing technology as device—simply means, with a shrinking perception of ends—endangers “focal things and practices” which are meant to “center and illuminate our lives” (4). With this thesis previewed, he briefly explains in what sense his book can be called a philosophy, and moves on.
Chapter 2, “Theories of Technology,” presents several current understandings of technology, which must be explored, as Borgmann will be presenting a competing one. First, he explains and rejects “the substantive view,” which may be understood as technological determinism. He also rejects “the instrumentalist view,” which sees technology simply as a “value-neutral tool” (10), and “the pluralist view” because it is basically the view that there can be no definitive “view” of technology to begin with. The chapter ends with another hint that his new “paradigmatic explanation of technology” (12) might suffice to supplant earlier rival ones. Chapter 3, “The Choice of a Theory,” expands this last point by shortly examining the work of Carl Mitcham.
Chapters 4-6 go together and make several key points: any theory—like Borgmann's to-be-proposed “device paradigm,” needs to deal with science both in relation to technology and as an epistemological basis for truth claims. However, though science “explains everything more precisely and more generally than any prior mode of explanation,” it also has explanatory limits and negative effects when too heavily relied upon, and may be enhanced, again, by the device paradigm (22).
Chapter 7, “Science and Technology,” finishes out Part 1. First, Borgmann explains that science tells us about the world as it actually is, while technology allows us to transform it into other possible worlds (27). The problem, however—returning to the limits of science from Chapter 6—is that “Neither . . . has a theory of what is worthy and in need of explanation or transformation” (27). Despite this problem, the modern world has taken science, and (by extension) technology as having “ushered in a new world view” (28)—they have become privileged and their above-noted limits have become systematically entrenched in culture, causing problems which he’ll go on to describe in Part 2 in terms of the device paradigm.
Part 2 Part 1 of Borgmann's book gave background information and began to argue that how the modern world relates to technology follows a pattern, which he calls the device paradigm. Part 2, starting with chapters 8-12, goes into more depth regarding this phenomenon.
Chapter 8, “The Promise of Technology,” describes the beginnings of how the world began to rely so heavily on technology to begin with. Through the Enlightenment and then the Industrial Revolution, humanity began to believe that technology was the key to “liberation from toil and the advancement of literacy, eating, and health” (38). With technology's “promise” thus in place—and he's careful to note some value and truth in said promise—it gradually took the prominence that led to the pattern in question.
Chapter 9, “The Device Paradigm,” consequently spells out the first main part of Borgmann's entire thesis directly: we now operate according to the device paradigm, where things have become devices. By this, he means that whereas we once acquired goods via use of things, which are “inseparable from . . . engagement,” we now get commodities via devices, which remove the “encumbrance of or the engagement with a context” (41, 47). As an example of the thing/device distinction, he offers a hearth—a thing with context that gives more than just the commodity of heat, e.g., togetherness—and a central heating plant, which does nothing but supply a commodity (41-42). Borgmann argues that insofar as we have become reliant upon devices in this sense, “the coherent and engaging character of the pretechnological world of things” has been jeopardized (47).
Chapter 10, “The Foreground of Technology,” seeks to present “the global effect of the paradigm” just described (48). Borgmann accomplishes this goal by focusing on more examples of the device paradigm in action, by exploring how advertising highlights the pattern, and by noting how people tend to now equate “real and simulated experiences” (55). He concludes that “we are more confident of our means”—our technological devices which allow us to acquire commodities easily—“than of our ends,” which have become diluted by the device paradigm, and which now include technology itself more than experiences, as it once was (56).
Chapters 11-12 attempt to “give the intuitive and descriptive account of the technological pattern a measure of systematic firmness and clarity” (57). In other words, these two chapters are more philosophical basis for the “intuitive and descriptive account” of the previous chapters. Basically, Borgmann here looks at “alternative models and perspectives” regarding technology—those of Arendt, Tribe, Walker, Kuhn, Winner, Billington, etc.—and at paradigm as a means of knowing/explaining in general, concluding that “the technological device can be discerned in seemingly conflicting contentions about the significance of machines, means, and ends in technology,” and that “the device paradigm reveals more clearly than any other just how and to what extent people move away from engagement” (57, 68, 77). Finally, he notes that his “demonstration” of this main part of his thesis “can attain at least a measure of cogency,” and thus moves to the topic of Chapters 13-16, dealing with “society and politics” (78).
Chapters 13-16 of Borgmann's text rest upon the assumption that “we should bring [the device paradigm] to the surface and to our attention” in all areas, and consequently that “we should judge society and politics in light of technology” (78). “Technology and the Social Order,” Chapter 13, thus makes several moves from this starting point.
First, Borgmann argues that “there is a problem of orientation in the technologically advanced countries”—“many analysts of the technological society are concerned about the progressive erosion of standards” (79). People, through politics, attempt to address this by “raising the question of values,” however, technology “is never in question” and is always “the means that allow us to realize our preferred values”—the “good life” (80). Borgmann then preemptively answers Marxist critics who would argue for economics over technology as primary in politics, concluding that “the positive goal of the good life that [Marxists] advance is in accord with the dubious promise of technology” (85). In other words, the device paradigm operates on society in an even deeper way than economics, so one must “turn to the examination of liberal democracy to throw light on the ways in which technology has come to rule our lives,” since it is within liberal democracy that technology has typically acquired such power (85).
Chapter 14, “Technology and Democracy,” is a key chapter in which Borgmann basically argues that the values of democracy “can be realized jointly only according to the pattern of technology” (86). This conclusion is couched within a close reading of Dworkin and the meaning of democracy itself, but page 92 makes clear: “Liberal democracy is enacted as technology. It does not leave the question of the good life open but answers it along technological lines . . . Technology developed into a definite style of life.” This “style of life” is one in which “it becomes possible to style and restyle one’s life by assembling and disassembling commodities” (92). Simply put, democracy values equality and choice—this is exactly the promise of technology: all things, available simply, available to all.