Eighteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

As Martin Heidegger suggests in his essay, “The Question Concerning Technology,” technology conceals all possibilities other than the technological way of life. The technological way of life shows us one way to be–active, driven, willful, productive and efficient. Technology is the engine(er) of progress. However, the very transformability and productivity so crucial to technology assumes that beings are simply available to us, and that this usefulness and availability (as well as the very notion of a simple being) presupposes nothing. The idea of the progress of technology assumes the self-evidence of the meaning and value of progress itself. Heidegger’s point is that hidden by the circle of technological reasoning are other ways of thinking and other ways of being, which includes (reflecting on) the detrimental aspects of technology. The self-evidence of progress is thus an extension of the self-evidence of technology–in a technological world without gaps, there is no space for self-understanding or self-questioning. The pressure for a productive life is exacerbated by social media, turning every part of private lives and personal identities into monetizable commodities, a pressure most noticeable in the online lives of women. Following Heidegger’s argument in his essay on technology, I will argue that the feminist response to the perils of social media is not to make the commodification of our lives more accessible to a wider group of people, but to de-emphasize the importance of monetization itself, and to reintroduce the value of acts that disrupt the reasoning of productivity.