Technology and cultural revenge

Don Ihde

pp. 251-263

in: Mano Daniel, Lester Embree (eds), Phenomenology of the cultural disciplines, Berlin, Springer, 1994

Abstract

Of all the cultural products of Euro-American recent history, technoscience is probably the most powerful. No nation has ever successfully colonized the world, nor gotten its language to be the lingua globale, nor even gotten its arts universalized. But technoscience is a world phenomenon which has englobed the earth. In this essay I focus upon one particularly powerful strand of contemporary technoscience—its "image" and communications technologies—which play an especially important cultural role in a technologically englobed earth. We are all familiar with and use them: television, cinema, telephonic and computer networks, even the newer "fax" technologies. Correlated with these image and communications technologies, I focus upon the emergence of what I call pluriculture, a unique form of late modern crossculturality. And, within pluriculture, I shall examine a set of theses around "technology and cultural revenge."