Heidegger was Right

Sitting on my couch typing this, as well as watching television and listening to my Zune (iPods are for losers), I can't help but think about Heidegger's ideas about technology. Inside Being and Time, an awesome book you should read that no one really understands, Heidegger talks about how technology makes its presence felt in our "average everydayness." He explains that being surrounded by so much technology allows us to completely absorb ourselves in technology so that we won't be preoccupied with the more important things in life, namely our own existential death. For Heidegger, the ultimate for our existence was the realization of its breakdown; we are nothing more than "thrown projection," beings that think about our own possibilities while being part of a social situation, and because of this our "own-most possibility" is to realize this nothingness. This realization is scary, and because of it we run from it towards something safe and familiar.

Whether or not you buy into any of this, my feelings are that most people won't, it seems that we do just this in our everyday dealings with things. How many people have watched television and surfed on the web at the same time? Who reads an e-book on their iPad while looking at pictures, listening to music, and surfing the web? Whether or not you buy into Heidegger's notions of the self is irrelevant; it's easy to see that the introduction and dissemination of technology within society has caused fundamental changes in how we interact with the world. Be it an unwillingness to confront ourselves, or just a need to be "up-to-date" with the world, it seems that technology is becoming eerily prevalent in our lives. Even more eerie, however, may be the prediction that technology would become so prominent by a man writing over eighty years ago.