On Cooking Technology

April 15, 2019 timothywstanley@me.com

Next book? Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life by Albert Borgmann, a philosopher who studied briefly under Heidegger. It was published 1984 and is definitely one of the foundational texts in philosophy of technology. Its chief contribution was to bring the focus on quality of life into the analysis. The point he was making in this book was that there are basically two types of paradigm to think about technology. On the one hand is the device paradigm: where all our experiences and daily life are somehow mediated by gadgets and technology. We heat our food in microwaves and use our heating systems to heat our house and listen to recorded music rather than going to concerts. The second, his normative idea, the one he wanted to be in, was the focal paradigm: and that was the real thing – like cooking your own food. His classic example of the device paradigm was buying frozen food in a supermarket, heating it in a microwave, and eating it while watching television. The good life and his alternative to that would be gathering the whole family and cooking your food on a stove, spending some time doing it and sitting down and conversing.

“The Best Books on Philosophy of Technology: Recommended by Evgeny Morozov” - fivebooks.com/best-books/evgeny-morozov-philosophy-technology/