Embodiment, technology and communication: A phenomenological exploration of communication in the technological milieu.

Abstract

Our potential for communication depends on a mutational characteristic of the consciousness structure as embodied, and not on the conscious subject as claimed by the objectivistic- or subjectivistic-biased theories that are based on Cartesian dualism. This study criticizes the absurdity of the objectivistic bias, as illuminated by Husserl, Merleau-Ponty's notion of "embodiment, " and Gebser's philosophy of "plus-mutation." After exploring the modern technological milieu as the inevitable consequence of objectivistic-biased tradition, the dangers of this milieu are illustrated with Ellul, Heidegger, and Mumford's arguments. Thereafter, this work considers how the annihilation of space results in the annihilation of communication. For that purpose, Peirce's semiotics, Gebser's "plus-mutation", and Kramer's dimensional accrual/dissociation theory are used as a methodological framework. This study shows the topological characteristic of the lived body that is rooted in habit and that develops through our embodiment within a social and cultural world. Through this phenomenological account of communication in the technological milieu, the fact that institutional, not constitutional, process between technologies as world and lived-human is integral to existential understandings of our relations to technology is indicated.