Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- 1 The Political Significance of Social Media and the Limits of Our Understanding
- 2 The Moral Significance of Social Networking Technologies
- 3 Why We Do What We Do
- 4 Time Consciousness and the Specious Present of Social Media
- 5 Pretty Is as Pretty Does
- 6 Revealing the Moral Self in the Context of Us
- Bibliography
- Index
6 - Revealing the Moral Self in the Context of Us
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 June 2018
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- 1 The Political Significance of Social Media and the Limits of Our Understanding
- 2 The Moral Significance of Social Networking Technologies
- 3 Why We Do What We Do
- 4 Time Consciousness and the Specious Present of Social Media
- 5 Pretty Is as Pretty Does
- 6 Revealing the Moral Self in the Context of Us
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
We shall be questioning concerning technology, and in so doing we should like to prepare a free relationship to it. The relationship will be free if it opens our human existence to the essence of technology. When we can respond to this essence, we shall be able to experience the technological within its own bounds (Heidegger, 1977, p. 1; emphasis in the original).
If our morality is being shaped in a detrimental way by our use of social media, how is it possible these same technologies could also offer a solution for its repair? The answer depends on whether we are willing to explore what social media reveals about us. Recall that Heidegger explained that technology is a “way of revealing” because it allows reality to come to presence while transforming our relation to it. This process of “revealing,” however, also orders our relationship with technology and our ontological state of Being in such a way that it limits our understanding. The ordering of technology is Enframing, which, in turn, creates the Gestell that limits what is revealed:
Enframing does not simply endanger man in his relationship to himself and to everything that is. As a destining, it banishes man into that kind of revealing which is an ordering. Where this ordering holds sway, it drives out every other possibility of revealing. Above all, Enframing conceals that revealing which, in the sense of poiesis, lets what presences come forth into appearance. As compared with that other revealing, the setting- upon that challenges forth thrusts man into a relation to that which is, that is at once antithetical and rigorously ordered (Heidegger, 1977, p. 14).
This description of our relationship with technology captures the current “danger” we face in our use of social media. Ironically, it is not the technology that is the danger. Rather, it is the technological ordering of our ontological Being that is the danger we must overcome. “The threat is not a problem for which there can be a solution but an ontological condition from which to be saved” (Dreyfus, 1995, p. 54). The solution for the moral problems we face with our use of social media is not then limited to technological fixes.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Social Media and MoralityLosing our Self Control, pp. 184 - 210Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2018