“We are becoming fluid and many-sided. Without quite realizing it, we have been evolving a sense of self appropriate to the restlessness and flux of our time.” – The Protean Self (R.J.Lifton)
What is the nature of Being in the burgeoning age of virtual networks?
How are modes of relating to one another, spaces, and information changing?
Our society is fast evolving from centering on hard modern technologies to soft postmodern technologies in tandem with a move to a postmodern identification with complexity and flexibility,
Our capacity to project our identity into an interactive cyberspace of other projected identities raises new questions about boundaries of intellect, collaboration, agency, authorship, self-knowledge, transhumanism, identity, shifts in neurological and social function…
Heidegger saw technology as enframing our way of being in the world. It can enable us to satisfy our desires, but there is always the danger of letting it obscure our essence as human beings. We must continually return to this always-already essence of being, and resist becoming functionaries for technology.
This is all the more applicable in an information-based society in which we present ourselves informatically through the medium of technological interfaces we have no understanding of.
The ontological, social and autobiographical implications for self-knowledge and agency in the novel complex networks of our virtualised society.
Philosophers and thinkers: Heidegger/Borgman/Nietzsche/Zizek/Harman/ Eagleman/Gorny/Self/Stirling/Lifton