To read this content please select one of the options below:

Insistent emplacement: Heidegger on the technologies of informing

Steven D. Brown (Centre for Social Theory & Technology, Department of Management, Keele University, Staffordshire, UK)
Geoffrey M. Lightfoot (Centre for Social Theory & Technology, Department of Management, Keele University, Staffordshire, UK)

Information Technology & People

ISSN: 0959-3845

Article publication date: 1 December 1998

749

Abstract

Explores how the work of Martin Heidegger may be read alongside our contemporary understandings of information technology. It begins by considering the view of information as degraded knowledge, a position refuted by Heidegger’s account of truth as correctness. Information is thereafter treated as a form of availability, grounded in the relation between humans and equipment, which is characterised by its insistence. A differentiation between various forms of equipment is made by way of Heidegger’s later writings on technics, leading to a discussion of information technology in the shadow of enframing, or emplacement. The central place of “anxiety” in our relationship to new technologies is underscored, and offered up as a way of thinking beyond the escalation of calculative ordering.

Keywords

Citation

Brown, S.D. and Lightfoot, G.M. (1998), "Insistent emplacement: Heidegger on the technologies of informing", Information Technology & People, Vol. 11 No. 4, pp. 290-304. https://doi.org/10.1108/09593849810246110

Publisher

:

MCB UP Ltd

Copyright © 1998, MCB UP Limited

Related articles