Making Sense of Mediated Information: Empowerment and Dependency

Abstract

For some time, philosophers of technology have offered us a stark choice between Utopia and dystopia. At the pessimistic end of this spectrum, Heidegger’s view that modern society is engaged in the transformation of the entire world, ourselves included, into ‘standing reserves’ — raw materials mobilised in technical processes (Heidegger, 1977), is echoed to a large extent in Habermas’ position that the central pathology of modern societies is the colonisation of lifeworld by system (Habermas, 1984). Medicine has frequently been put in the dock as a particular culprit in this ‘technicisation’ of social relations. As Foucault (1977: 283) put it:

Medicine, as a general technique of health even more than as a service to the sick or an art of cures, assumes an increasingly important place in the administrative system and the machinery of power.