CFP: Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology
Submission deadline: August 1, 2021
Topic areas
Details
The distinction between “being on the internet” and “being in the real world” is eroding. Increasingly, “real life” seems to take place online. For example, texting and social media change what it means to be close to or far from our loved ones; for many of us, video conferencing collapses the distinction between home, work, and school; and online shopping disrupts the institutional structures of commerce. It is also the case that our virtual existence and actions alter the way we inhabit the physical world. For example, Google Maps changes what it means to get lost; Air BnB changes who our neighbors are; and dating apps dominate the way many of us evaluate and meet romantic partners. Looking to the future, augmented reality holds the possibility of fracturing our collective experience of a shared environment.
This special issue of Techné aims to interrogate the way modern digital technology enhances, hampers, entangles, or alters our experience of our lived worlds, understanding that to mean everything from GPS devices, to altered reality games, to social media environments, to fully virtual worlds. We hope to examine these issues from a wide variety of philosophical perspectives such as environmental philosophy, phenomenology, philosophy of technology, or social and political philosophy.
- How is the world given through the mediation of digital technology?
- What notions of self are deployed or instantiated?
- How are structures of intersubjectivity shaped or assumed by digital technology?
- How is our sense of place enhanced, diminished, or altered?
- What sorts of groups become possible and what sorts disappear?
- What underexamined implications for social justice are raised by new technologies?
- What role do engineers and developers have in the construction of these virtual worlds compared to what they take their role to be?
Please submit papers directly to guest editors at: [email protected]. The editors can also be reached at [email protected] and [email protected] for questions.