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A Phenomenology of Digitization Michigan Technological University Digital Commons @ Michigan Tech Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports 2018 Digitization of the World: A Phenomenology of Digitization Thomas C. Adolphs Michigan Technological University, [email protected] Copyright 2018 Thomas C. Adolphs Recommended Citation Adolphs, Thomas C., "Digitization of the World: A Phenomenology of Digitization", Open Access Dissertation, Michigan Technological University, 2018. https://doi.org/10.37099/mtu.dc.etdr/641 Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.mtu.edu/etdr Part of the Continental Philosophy Commons, Digital Humanities Commons, Epistemology Commons, Ethics and Political Philosophy Commons, Philosophy of Mind Commons, and the Philosophy of Science Commons DIGITIZATION OF THE WORLD: A PHENOMENOLOGY OF DIGITIZATION By Thomas C. Adolphs A DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY In Rhetoric, Theory, and Culture MICHIGAN TECHNOLOGICAL UNIVERSITY 2018 © 2018 Thomas C. Adolphs This dissertation has been approved in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in Rhetoric, Theory, and Culture. Department of Humanities Dissertation Advisor: Dr. Michael Bowler Committee Member: Dr. Robert R. Johnson Committee Member: Dr. Stefka Hristova Committee Member: Dr. Charles Wallace Department Chair: Dr. Ron Strickland Table of Contents Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................ iv Abstract ................................................................................................................................v Introduction ..........................................................................................................................1 Chapter One: Phenomenology and Digitization ................................................................20 Chapter Two: Embodiment and Digitization .....................................................................43 Chapter Three: Space and Digitization ..............................................................................76 Chapter Four: Intersubjectivity and Digitization .............................................................108 Work Cited .......................................................................................................................144 iii Acknowledgements I would like to offer my thanks and appreciation to the faculty and staff of the Humanities Department at Michigan Technological University. This dissertation is the result of years spent within the program, which allowed for an interdisciplinary approach to my graduate education, from my Master’s degree through the completion of my Doctorate degree. The freedom granted to me within the program was not without personal struggle, but it did ultimately facilitate the discovery of my passion in philosophy, while simultaneously allowing me to work with and teach hands-on digital technologies and new media to undergraduates at the university. Thank you to Dr. Michael Bowler, my committee chair, who has not only been a mentor for years now but has also had an enormous influence on my philosophic education and life. Thank you to my committee: Dr. Robert R. Johnson, Dr. Stefka Hristova, and Dr. Charles Wallace for both insight and encouragement through this process. I would also like to acknowledge Kevin Cassell, Joel Beatty, and Amanda Kaye Girard, former graduate students in the Humanities Department who enriched my thinking, as well as befriended me throughout my time at Michigan Technological University. To Department Coordinator, Jacqueline Ellenich, and Director of Degree Graduate Services, Nancy Byers Sprague, thank you for the continued support and reliant answering of my questions regarding the process, forms, and procedures needed to graduate. And lastly, thank you to my mother, Janice Cox- Adolphs, the best proofreader and person of support that one could ask for! iv Abstract The dissertation analyzes digitization through a phenomenological lens, understanding the digitization as an “outgrowth” of a potential that was always already latent within our being as the human-being. The analysis primarily utilizes the philosophic work of the 20th century philosophers, Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Through their philosophies, I seek to synthesize Heidegger’s concept of de-severance with Merleau-Ponty’s concepts of embodiment and the world as possessing depth. In doing so, I bring these theoretical concepts together to build a phenomenological “picture” of how it is that the digitization of the world came into being. All the while, my ultimate project is seeking and displaying the underlying drive, or will, that occurs when human de-severance, our particular embodiment, and our unique access to the world as depth discover within the world the potential to digitize. This will, and the result of the interplay between human de-severance, embodiment, and the world’s depth is the-will-to-flatten. In putting forth this theory, I analyze how the will-to-flatten via digitization has influenced our understandings and engagement with embodiment, space, and intersubjectivity. While I argue that the will-to-flatten is the driving force of digitization, I ultimately seek to display that the telos of this will is a paradox that cannot be resolved. v Introduction “Generalization of the problem: there was a passage to the infinite as objective infinity-- This passage was a thematization (and forgetting) of the Offenheit, of the Life-World (Lebenswelt)--We have to start anew from behind that point.” – Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, (166) The world has become increasingly digitized and will only continue to be impacted by this digitization. Digitization, clearly denoting the material transition from analog to digital, but given the context of this dissertation, will primarily be analyzed phenomenologically as an ontological phenomenon in the attempt to better understand the driving force “behind” digitization. One straightforward reason for the significance of this endeavor is that digitization has become an indispensable facet of modernity’s reality. So ubiquitous is digitization to the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries that, much like air, there is a tendency to presuppose its presence. Digitization’s existence has so fully saturated our lives that it’s easy to overlook just how vital it is to the contemporary moment, but one need not worry. We won’t be able to forget for too long, as we are being reminded by a significant flow of scholarship - scholarship that informs us just how digital technologies and media not only exist with us, but how they are literally changing the world itself, for better or worse. And this work has established essential arguments and conversation points in regards to how we should treat digitization as we move towards the future, where human and the digital continue to merge. For example, Marshall McLuhan, a visionary of digital media and its implications, published an eye-opening text in 1964, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. This text established a vital recognition that the medium, and by that McLuhan means the tangible technology itself, whether ancient or new, fundamentally alters the way we live our lives, influencing even our actions and thoughts (8). A television does not simply present us with discrete images. The television itself alters the structure of the home; where we sit and converse with 1 friends and loved ones is changed by the presence of the television. Anne Friedberg’s The Virtual Window brings us back to the screen, not simply as a tangible apparatus, but as the metaphoric window through which so many of us encounter each and every day. She writes, “The frame of the screen is a closed system, a primary container for inset secondary and tertiary frames that may recede in mise en abyme, but also converge to reunite within a grander but still bounded frame” (241). The realities of our screens are paramount to our fundamental understanding of the world and others, Friedberg tells us. Screens both frame and filter, and hence, framing always produces a double phenomenon. The frame simultaneously includes while it excludes. But do we consider this exclusion, or unquestioningly take what is included as our existence? What is being framed? What is not? We must continue to ask ourselves these questions in the age of the screen or our realties will be shaped by it. Douglas Rushkoff, in Program or Be Programmed, urges us in a similar vein to confront our digital technology and media devices as active users, and not to be unknowingly swayed by their potential power. He states, “Understanding programing - either as a real programmer or even, as I’m suggesting, as more of a critical thinker - is the only way to truly know what’s going on in a digital environment, and to make willful choices about the roles we play” (8). Our technologies, and those who control them, are programming us, Rushkoff insists. We must know the program, the digital code, or at least be cognizant of it if we wish to reprogram ourselves. Meanwhile, Nicholas Carr investigates digital technologies and their capacity to change the human brain in What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains: The Shallows. Much like Socrates’ warning in The Phaedrus, Carr addresses digital technology’s increasing capacity to act as an extension of the mind, potentially diminishing our
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