Channels, Fall 2016

Channels • 2016 • Volume 1 • Number 1 Page 47 human being-in-the-world. Specifically, Ellul showed how an enslavement to efficiency changes the manner in which humans build their places of dwelling. Flusser focused on similar questions but delved deeper into the existential battle of techno- imagery. Flusser asked how the electronic medium and interface influences everyday existence. Media ecology reveals the connection between questions of human existence and how humans interface with the world around them. By situating the technical phenomenon and isolating its impact of human ontology, Flusser and Ellul contributed to the essential dialogue of modernity’s technological condition. Although there are a number of factors to the human mode of existence, technique has become one of the primary influences on modern life. Technique does not simply refer to the existence of technology. Technique refers to the essence of technology — in other words, Heidegger's technological mode. It is a mindset which privileges efficiency and mechanization. Ellul (1964) defined technique as, “the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity” (p. xxv). But technique is not machinery. Indeed, technique arose from machines (p. 5) but has become far larger than them. Ellul (1964) made the case that technique affects all aspects of human life: Technique integrates everything. It avoids shock and sensational events. Man is not adapted to a world of steel; technique adapts him to it. It changes the arrangement of this blind world so that man can be a part of it without colliding with its rough edges, without the anguish of being delivered up to the inhuman. Technique thus provides a model; it specifies attitudes that are valid once and for all. The anxiety aroused in man by the turbulence of the machine is soothed by the consoling hum of a unified Society. (p. 6) Technique is a way of being-in-the-world. The logic of technique brings Dasein in line with what is best for machinery instead of placing machinery in line with what is best for Dasein. Heidegger himself made a similar argument about technology. Heidegger (1977) said that, “We will, as we say, ‘get’ technology ‘spiritually in hand.’ We will master it. The will to mastery becomes all the more urgent and more technology threatens to slip from human control” (p. 2). The will to master technology is dangerous in many ways. Technology becomes part of the ontological discussion at the point where technology is a fundamental part of the human relationship to the environment and to other people. Electronic technology has radically shifted the human’s being-in-the-world. They write electronically, not by hand. Their clothes and products are produced by machines in factories. Their primary means of connecting with other humans becomes increasingly based on smart phones and personal computers rather than dwelling in the same spaces with one another. Ellul pointed to two primary areas where technique is shifting cultural expectations of living: work (or building ) and free time (or dwelling ). Technology and technique have become an all-encompassing part of work. Ellul's The Technological Society supplied a chronology of technique’s impact on work throughout the