Technology is Not a Thing but a Mindset
For Heidegger, the essence of technology has nothing to do with the technological. For him, technology is a mindset, a way of looking at the world as “standing reserve,” a stock of exploitable resources. He calls this mindset “enframing,” and it’s something that has encompassed everything. A river, for instance, reveals itself as a power supplier; a tract of land “reveals itself as a coal mining district, the soil as a mineral deposit” (p. 14). Enframing has even encapsulated man (we are, after all, in the eyes of Big Tech the sum of our data). And now, as demonstrated by the advent of ChatGPT, enframing has swallowed up language, turning it from something uniquely human into a large-language model and a complex series of statistical outcomes.
Others have put forth similar ideas: There’s Marshall McLuhan’s famous dictum: “The medium is the message” and Walter Ong’s, “Technologies are not mere exterior aids but also interior transformations of consciousness.” Or, as Caitlyn Flanagan (2021) simply put it in a piece for The Atlantic, “Twitter didn’t live in the phone. It lived in me.”
What, then, is the mindset that governs our word-processing technology? For one thing, that spelling, punctuation, and grammar no longer matter. Ask any student and you will discover that in the medium of texting, the idea of proper capitalization, punctuation, and even proper spacing are frowned upon, even regarded as prissy and pretentious (though these are not the words they used). A period, I’m told, is seen as “aggressive” or a display of anger. It comes as no surprise, then, that this mindset is reflected in the lockdown browser quiz environment, or in the hand-written work of many of our students: work in which everything is in lower-case, including the first-person pronoun; apostrophes that are nowhere to be found; strange, idiosyncratic spacing choices before and after punctuation; and lines that begin with a comma or period. And let’s not even get into the issues of grammar and spelling. (Even my own spelling, I’m forced to confront week after week when standing at the whiteboard, has atrophied as a result of auto-correct.)
Is this simply laziness or do the students really not know the rules?
The answer, of course, is both. In a world in which hitting the shift key or space bar is too much effort, and our reliance on auto-correct, auto-fill, Grammarly, and now AI, have come to dominate, the technological mindset that Heidegger identified means that there is no real incentive to even know the rules in the first place, that little in fact needs to be remembered or internalized, carelessness is the norm, attention to detail is no longer valued, and independent thought can now be outsourced to technology whose vast sweep has beguiled all of us to varying degrees. If technology is a mindset, it means that a kind of somnambulance governs the classroom, and English class in particular: one need not pay attention (or even attend) if online classes are recorded, which can later be watched and rewatched at 1.25 speed, skipping all the “boring bits.” Note-taking, too, has become obsolete because PowerPoint slides and videos are posted in the course shell, and, more recently, so are AI-generated summaries of the lesson are now available for online classes. And if notes are required, students will often take photos of the whiteboard or screenshots in an online class. Even the idea of writing by hand has become alien, not just to our students but for many teachers as well. (Although many other issues are at play here, one thing is certain: when we abandoned the teaching of cursive, we did so because we believed it no longer served a practical purpose; but what we didn’t realize was that it specifically taught those things that are currently lacking: attention to detail, the importance of rules (and their internalization through frequent repetition), the appreciation of beauty, and to strive for it. It taught us that even the physical act of writing—the tangible feel of it—can be a joy.)
We call all our so-called technological advancements “convenience” and delude ourselves into believing this is “progress,” yet we fail to realize that the tyranny of convenience has a corrosive effect, for we do not seem to realize that in making things easier and more convenient we also do away with motivation. In fact, the technological mindset only instills the idea that reading and writing are tedious, difficult, and boring. But as well all know, there needs to be a degree of difficulty, of pain—of failure—without which there can be no learning and ultimately no reward. No pain, no gain, as they say. After all, anything worth doing or having must be difficult to achieve, and essay writing is supposed to be difficult. But if the very basics haven’t been learned and internalized, if remembering anything is too onerous and overwhelming, all learning will only become increasingly difficult, not less; and what gets taught in the classroom will necessarily have to become more and more remedial—“dumbed down,” as it were. This is not speculation; this is happening now.
But there is another, more insidious, effect: when even language itself has become subject to enframing and reduced to something that can be mobilized via AI to answer the most esoteric prompt in the form of a well-written essay in a matter of seconds, language itself becomes cheapened and our curiosity is deadened. This is the real danger. When all reading and writing become difficult and boring, who will want to explore the great works of the past? Who will even know of them or be interested enough to read them, be inspired by them, and driven to write or think about them? Who will be excited by books or take pleasure in their ideas? If technology is not a thing but a mindset, that mindset has increasingly been characterized by apathy and indolence. And if the most recent PISA report—in which student scores in literacy, math, and science have, for the first time ever, shown an “ ‘unprecedented drop in performance’ globally”—is any indication, it’s that we stand on the brink of a worrying trend, one in which literacy and the concentration it demands will cease to taken for granted, as it is now, but will become a highly valued skill that, just like in the Middle Ages, might once again be held in the hands of a small group of highly trained individuals.
