If several of the other articles were a little too excited in favor of the iPod, this article helped balance the effect by being almost paranoid of the “awesome and dangerous powers of that little machine.” Emanuelis Levinas quote of Blaise Pascal in describing the “beginning of immorality as the self’s declaration of possession” page 149 is even more effective following Dumitrica’s “The iPod is about me, about my experiences, my time management, my preferences” from the previous chapter.
Several people in this class joined in previous discussions on Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto” and it was interesting to see how her adamant claims are gently absorbed into iPod culture. The iPod may simply be a means of expediting obtaining knowledge about a person, an encapsulated version (oversimplification?) of the complex forces and experiences that have shaped the unique individual which can now only be expressed through a mechanical cyborg model.
The Martin Heidegger quote on scientific observation “it takes care not to see in order to understand what it sees … but only in order to see” is ambivalent beyond human expectations. Can a human not be touched by what he sees? Not try to think beyond the visual? Not question beyond the observable? I appreciate his view on the river (page 150) but calculative thinking is symbiotically tied to meditative thinking (referenced by Condella in Chapter 8) and part of what separates the human inquisitive nature from what we consider lower life forms.
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