Socio-philosophical critique of information technology: the case of television

Ilya T. Kasavin
Russ­ian Acad­e­my of Sci­ences. RAS Insti­tute of Phi­los­o­phy
Lobachevsky State Uni­ver­si­ty of Nizh­ni Nov­gorod

Socio-philo­soph­i­cal cri­tique of infor­ma­tion tech­nol­o­gy: the case of tele­vi­sion

Abstract. This paper com­ments on Anton N. Fortunatov’s arti­cle about the nature of mod­ern tele­vi­sion. Shar­ing his socio-crit­i­cal inten­tion, the author iden­ti­fies three con­cepts that facil­i­tate com­pre­hen­sion of the sug­gest­ed top­ic in a philo­soph­i­cal and the­o­ret­i­cal way. These are con­cep­tu­al pairs “vir­tu­al­i­ty – real­i­ty”, “con­struc­tion – rep­re­sen­ta­tion” and “social tech­nolo­gies – social prac­tices”. On the case of tele­vi­sion as a spe­cif­ic cul­tur­al phe­nom­e­non and a spe­cif­ic tech­nol­o­gy the author demon­strates how moder­ni­ty is root­ed in his­to­ry, knowl­edge – in activ­i­ty, and tech­nol­o­gy – in sci­ence. The the­sis that medi­al­i­ty has swal­lowed the entire mod­ern world seems jus­ti­fied not so much in its uni­ver­sal­is­tic ver­sion, but rather as a char­ac­ter­is­tic of every­day life. The pow­er of infor­ma­tion tech­nol­o­gy deserves both a crit­i­cal eval­u­a­tion and com­pre­hen­sion in terms of the alter­na­tives gen­er­at­ed by phi­los­o­phy and the human­i­ties.

Key­words: infor­ma­tion tech­nol­o­gy, vir­tu­al­i­ty, real­i­ty, con­struc­tion, rep­re­sen­ta­tion, social tech­nolo­gies, sci­ence.

DOI: 10.5840/dspl20181441

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