Heidegger, Habermas and the Mobile Phone - Postmodern Encounters

George Myerson

Totem Books

2001

80 páginas

2h 40m

ISBN-13: 9781840462364

Move over e-commerce, mantra of the late 20th century … welcome m-commerce, catchword of the new millennium! Everyone remembers ‘It’s good to talk’, the cosy slogan of the telephone at the end of the last century. But now we are witnessing a global campaign to promote the mobile: as a credit card, Internet link, e-mail port and, if you still have time, voice-mail junction. By 2003, we are told, there will be 900 million Internet-connected mobiles.
This ‘Postmodern Encounter’ gives the gist of the massive campaign to ‘mobilise’ the globe, and asks the urgent question: what is happening to the idea of ‘communication’? Key thinkers of the 20th century offer an essential alternative to these new doctrines of m-communication: Martin Heidegger, who saw humanity as ‘the entity which talks’, and Jürgen Habermas, current-day advocate of authentic communication. This is a close encounter between alien visions of communication – between the conflicting utopianisms of 20th-century philosophers and 21st-century ‘mobilised communication’.