Technology as Experience

Making Sense of Living with Technology

You don’t just use technology: You live with it every day; it is integrated into everything you do. You might like this intimate engagement with technology when you get a cell phone call from a distant friend. You might hate it when you have to move away from helping people – your real job, as you see it – to face yet another computer screen. But what does it mean and how can you make sense of technology’s role in human life? To answer, go beyond examining what a specific system or object was designed to do. Instead, try to make sense of the “felt” experience, the way people become emotionally involved with technology and machines.

This challenge has undergone a historical progression. In the’70s, computer usage was straightforward: usually, one person used one machine. The ’80s emphasized performance and interconnection, as people interacted via computer. In the ’90s, consumer use of computers grew, so manufacturers had to make the technological experience as “rich” as possible. Philosophy offers a variety of conceptual approaches for understanding this “human-computer interaction.” These include rationalism, pragmatism, ethnography...