What can we learn from Don Ihde?

Human-technology relations
At the heart of Don Ihde’s post-phenomenological approach to technology is an analysis of various types of relations between human beings, technologies, and the world. Ihde investigated in which ways technologies play a role in human-world relations, ranging from being ‘embodied’ and being ‘read’, to being ‘interacted with’ and being at the ‘background’.Embodiment relations
In embodiment relations, technologies form a unity with a human being, and this unity is directed at the world: we speak with other people through the phone, rather than speaking to the phone itself, and we look through a microscope rather than at it. Ihde schematises this relation as:(human – technology) —> world.
Hermeneutic relations
human —> (technology – world).
Alterity relations
human —> technology (world).
Background relations
human (technology / world).
Mutual constitution
It might be tempting to see mediation as a process in which a transformation occurs of the manner in which a human subject experiences a world of objects – in other words, as a process between a fixed subject and a fixed object, in which only the manner in which the object is experienced by the subject is affected. Yet, from a phenomenological point of view this is not what is happening in technical mediation. The relation between subject and object always precedes subject and object themselves; they are constituted in their interrelation. This notion of mutual constitution must be borne in mind when considering Ihde’s discussion of the various relations between humans and artefacts. Mediation does not simply take place between a subject and an object, but rather co-shapes subjectivity and objectivity. Humans and the world they experience are the products of technical mediation, and not just the poles between which the mediation plays itself out.Multistability
The insight that technologies are indissolubly linked with humans-in-culture implies that technologies have no ‘essence’; they are only what they are in their use. Ihde names this ambiguity of technology ‘multistability’, and to clarify what this means he makes use of a perceptual example, the so-called Necker cube (fig. 1).References
Ihde, D. 1976. Listening and Voice. Athens: Ohio University Press.———. 1979. Technics and Praxis. Dordrecht: Reidel.———. 1983. Existential Technics. Albany: SUNY Press.———. 1990. Technology and the Lifeworld. The Indiana Series in the Philosophy of Technology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.———. 1991. Instrumental Realism. The Indiana Series in the Philosophy of Technology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.———. 1993a. Philosophy of Technology: An Introduction. New York: Paragon House.———. 1993b. Postphenomenology. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.———. 1998. Expanding Hermeneutics. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.Philosophy of Technology and Design: Shaping the Relations Between Humans and Technologies

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