Murdoch University, Perth
Institute for Sustainability and Technology Policy
Semester 1

Technology as form of life

von: Stefan Krauss

Short Essay 1C

(i) What does Winner mean when he says ′technologies are forms of life′?

(ii) Could technology make it possible to radically change what it means to be human?

(i) What does Winner mean when he says ′technologies are forms of life′?

In his book "The Whale and the Reactor", Langdon Winner introduces technologies as forms of life. With this notion, he tries to overcome "our normal understanding of the meaning of technology in human life" (p. 12), which he declares as a "widespread and ex-tremely narrow conception" (p. 12). Although it remains unclear about whom he refers to, the ′normal understanding′ seems to be an understanding of technology as a "cause-and-effect model" (p. 11), to which he attests "empirical and moral shortcomings"(p. 11). Winner endeavours to explain the connection between technologies and the everyday life. What is needed is an interpretation of the ways, both obvious and subtle, in which everyday life is transformed by the mediating role of technical devices. (p. 9). Nowadays, technologies are so interwoven into the texture of everyday life that life is un-thinkable without them. At least for the western industrialized countries, it is valid that "Humans must adapt. That is their destiny" (p. 10). Winner describes this situation as fol-lows:

We do indeed ′use′ telephones, automobiles, electric lights, and computers in the conventional sense of picking them up and putting them down. But our world soon becomes one in which telephony, automobility, electric lightning, and computing are forms of life in the most powerful sense: life would scarcely be thinkable without them. (p. 11) Originally, the expression "forms of life" (Lebensform) came from the later Wittgenstein. By rejecting his earlier ideas of the "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus", in which he sketches "language to be primarily a matter of naming things and events" (p.11), he stresses in the "Philosophical Investigations" the mutuality of language and the circumstances, the sur-roundings, in which it is spoken or written. In this ordinary language philosophy, he takes into account that words, symbols, and sentences, which are woven into (speech-) acts, in the end are based on the concepts of the human living in all its different social, cultural, and in-terpersonal forms. Language is not seen as a "non-spatial, non temporal phantasm" (PI, § 108), but as a "spatial and temporal phenomenon" (PI, § 108) taking place in various lan-guage-games, which are overlapping and criss-crossing. "The term language-game is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is a part of an activity, or a form of life." (PI, § 23) Winner extends Wittgenstein′s concept. For Winner a form of life is not only constituted by speech-acts, but also by acts like typing on the computer or driving a car. It is to be empha-sised, that through these acts our forms of life alter, thus "technologies are involved in changing the practices and patterns of everyday life" (Winner 1997, p. 992). For example, the invention of the telephone is not only a means to the end communication, but also it es-tablished a new form of communication, through which the sense of the old ways of com-munication changed. Since the telephone is common, the writing of letters plays another role.

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