Technology Is Ubiquitous, What Do You Experience?
Every day I spend my entire noon doing my praxis routine to make some crafts. Absolutely, when making a craft, I was encircled by many tools to help my job, so that it is light enough to make stuff by being helped by many tools. There are several tools I usually use, namely a drill, a hammer, scissors, solder, meter, ruler, glue, tape, and others. They have to be at hand. My activity, otherwise, cannot be accomplished. I become aware that my job cannot be completed well enough if all of those tools are not available in front of me.
I desire to regard all of my tools as a sort of technologies that I can use to assist and complete my work. I know that most people rarely reflect on stuff around them, so that their existence in the world cannot be experienced existentially. Here I intend to unravel not what the functions of those tools, but what the relationship between tools and our existence is, in particular my experience when using tools.
When using my drill to bore an object, I was seriously not aware of the existence of my drill at all. Even though I saw it exactly on my hand, I did not need to pay attention on it because I only needed to take notice of what I was accurately doing. Here, embodiment between my body and the drill becomes one, united, integrated, or merged, because, in addition to the drill being vanished, the drill becomes my bodily extension itself and performs itself by way of being incorporated in my body. Consequently, the drill was by no means the other, but myself.
That happened as well when I was using my solder to connect cables. When connecting them, my mind was absorbed to be solely aware of what I was merely doing, with the result that I did not realise the existence of the solder I was grasping. Absolutely, this indicates that when using a tool, or technology, to assist our activity, we really do not need to pay attention on the tool, but on the job we are doing. Furthermore, this is as if the tool used by us withdrew itself, became absent from our consciousness, or transparent, so that we recognise and regard it as our body, hand, itself.
In our experience using tools or technologies pertaining to such a bodily extension, when doing our activity by tools, we only become aware of the existence of the tools once the tools do not function, or do not work like usual, in order that we realise that that tool has its own existence and no longer becomes our bodily extension. Undeniably, we cannot generalise that all tools or technologies can be such a transparent situation and such an experience of the bodily extensions. This only occurs when, and only when, the tools are fused in our embodiment relations to what we are doing.
In my tools, I cannot experience such a bodily extension when using my meter or my ruler to measure length of a thing. Moreover, the existence of that meter has to keep existing in front of my eyes. In other words, that meter cannot withdraw itself as my drill in the first, because I still realised the existence of that meter, or else I was not able to be measuring the length of the thing. It is clear enough that there is a conspicuous difference between my drill and my meter. In the former, I was experiencing such a bodily extension, but in the later, I could not, not because of whether or not I handled the two differently, but indeed because of the fact that both of them are two distinct experiences.
That meter as a tool of reading “text” of the length of a thing must indeed exist, and its existence cannot become transparent, but exactly vice-versa becomes opaque. Therefore, we can simply identify there are two modes of existence of a technology when used, that is, the first is a technology which tends to be transparent when used and the second is a technology which tends to be opaque when used. Furthermorer, the opacity and the transparency of technologies depend on how and for what we use them.
When used to be interpreting “reality”, as a meter, ruler, thermometer, or others, technology becomes opaque because we need its opacity to read a datum presented or demonstrated by it. Otherwise, we understand nothing. Whereas, in the other side, it turns out there is a technology in which we are not aware of the existence when using it, on the grounds of it being transparent in front of us — which is caused by our bodily extension.[]
References: Technics and Praxis: A Philosophy of Technology; Bodies in Technology; Technology and the Lifeworld (written by Don Ihde)