Reply #249: The saddest thing about this silly post

[alcibiades_mystery]

Is that it is wrong about both Heidegger and Foucault. Heidegger's complaint with technology, which he modified a great deal after The Question Concerning Technology, is not that it "dehumanizes," whatever that means (the mode of being of the They - or das Man - is utterly human in Heidegger), but that it covers over a particular form of relation to Being (that is, a relation to the impossibility of being that would disclose Being, or reveal the ontological difference). The problem is that turning the world into things (the standing reserve) covers over possibility. This would be just as true of a technology like toilet paper as it would of Twitter. You don't get to pick and choose the technologies you don't like as examples.

Foucault, furthermore, is not particularly concerned with "privacy." The very relation of public and private in modern systems is an effect of disciplinary power relationships - there is no "privacy" that is outside of or shielded from power. In any case, we've all been living in panoptic space since the seventeenth century. Bentham's model is just the intense saturation of those power relationships. If anything, Twitter and similar technologies would show you that we've moved through the disciplinary forms Foucault was analyzing (and Foucault always said as much) and into novel versions of control. In Twitter, for example, there is no "central viewer" position as there would be in a Panoptic model; rather, one both confesses to everybody all the time and takes everyone else's confession all the time (by following, etc.). How would you evaluate the seeming return to a synoptic model that social media clearly deploy?

It's not even necessary to critique your post from the outside, in other words. You sound like a college sophomore who took some Intro to Continental Philosophy class, read "The Question Concerning Technology" and the "Panopticon" chapter from Discipline and Punish, and wrote a fairly painful paper about it. There's nothing wrong with this. We all learn some way. But you should know that both these discourses are far more complicated than your self-assured application of them would suggest.