Heidegger, Habermas and the Mobile Phone

by George Myerson

Book Overview

Global instantaneous mobile telephony is at the cutting edge of the communications revolution. Humanity, for Martin Heidegger, is 'the entity that talks'; Jurgen Habermas is a passionate advocate of... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1840462361
• ISBN13: 9781840462364
• Release Date: February 2001
• Publisher: Totem Books
• Length: 80 Pages
• Weight: 0.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 4.4" x 6.9"

Customer Reviews

Interesting mix of popular culture and philosophy

This is one of my favorite books. It is a slim little book but manages to raise important questions about communication, cell phone culture, and (post)modern society. I found the writing style to be clear and lucid, more "English" than "American." I think it is unfair to expect of this book an elucidation of Habermas and Heidegger (especially Heidegger) when its goal is to ambitiously apply the theory of these two philosophers to the world of cell phones. I applaud the author for bringing philosophy to pop culture, and vice versa. Myerson makes many good points and I heartily recommend this book, which has much to offer the questionable society we are living in. This little book is also a cautionary tale about the visit to Starbucks as the epitome of communication and civilization which, unfortunately, most of us are not heeding. But I give Myerson credit for trying. Working in more of Buber's I/Thou, I/It philosophy would have taken Myerson's argument to the next level.

Good, short, concrete introduction to Heidegger and Habermas

This is really a very useful book in introducing some central concepts of Heidegger's philosophy and Habermas' social theory as they bear on the frantically growing domain of information-technology-mediated and mobile life, experience, and communication, through a critique of the ideology surrounding the marketing and diffusion of mobile phones (meaning not just cellular phones but especially Internet-capable phones and devices). Myerson uses as his text both marketing literature and newspaper stories about mobile phones and the kind of communication that they are intended for and promote, criticizing them through presenting the alternate models of communication, meaning, and understanding that are central to the work of Heidegger and Habermas in such a way that a reader with no prior acquaintance with these two thinkers could get the gist of what they are trying to do with their thought, and makes Habermas' conception of communication as sharing understanding and meaning and Habermas' distinction between system and lifeworld seem graspable and concretely relevant in terms that everyone has already experienced. He includes an appendix with a brief introductory bibliography for anyone wanting to learn more about these two H's. The book is also extremely short, really it is the length of a magazine article and could be read in an hour or two: the main text is 67 pages long, each of which contains no more than half the amount of print in a standard book. The one critique that one can make of this book is that like other kinds of critiques of ideology, it takes the ideology of mobile phones (e.g. Nokia's self-description of the nature and future of mobile phones) at face value, without paying attention to the ways in which people are often a lot smarter and socially savvy than corporations and advertisers take them to be, and often bend to their own lifeworld purposes and social meanings the devices and methods that are marketed under the ideology of instrumental and efficient communication and behavior. But for a quick, useful introduction to Heidegger and Habermas and a quick critical perspective on the emergent wired world, this book does a very good job.