Heidegger, Habermas and the Mobile Phone (Postmodern Encounters)

Rating:
Summary: Enough to Make One Puke
Review: There is nothing about Heidegger in this pamphlet unless one counts mentioning his name and providing a misrepresentation of his philosophy as something.

The writing substance and style are appauling, as if the pamphlet was a first year college essay. The author's first quote from Heidegger is so inane that it would seem his knowledge of Heideggerian philosophy came from a third or fourth removed source. I suspect Nokia paid him quite a bit of money.

I couldn't even continue on to see what he had to say about Habermas! The publishers should be paying you $7.95 if you have to buy this book for any reason save throwing on the lumber pile!

Rating:
Summary: Good, short, concrete introduction to Heidegger and Habermas
Review: This is really a very useful book in introducing some central concepts of Heidegger's philosophy and Habermas' social theory as they bear on the frantically growing domain of information-technology-mediated and mobile life, experience, and communication, through a critique of the ideology surrounding the marketing and diffusion of mobile phones (meaning not just cellular phones but especially Internet-capable phones and devices). Myerson uses as his text both marketing literature and newspaper stories about mobile phones and the kind of communication that they are intended for and promote, criticizing them through presenting the alternate models of communication, meaning, and understanding that are central to the work of Heidegger and Habermas in such a way that a reader with no prior acquaintance with these two thinkers could get the gist of what they are trying to do with their thought, and makes Habermas' conception of communication as sharing understanding and meaning and Habermas' distinction between system and lifeworld seem graspable and concretely relevant in terms that everyone has already experienced. He includes an appendix with a brief introductory bibliography for anyone wanting to learn more about these two H's. The book is also extremely short, really it is the length of a magazine article and could be read in an hour or two: the main text is 67 pages long, each of which contains no more than half the amount of print in a standard book. The one critique that one can make of this book is that like other kinds of critiques of ideology, it takes the ideology of mobile phones (e.g. Nokia's self-description of the nature and future of mobile phones) at face value, without paying attention to the ways in which people are often a lot smarter and socially savvy than corporations and advertisers take them to be, and often bend to their own lifeworld purposes and social meanings the devices and methods that are marketed under the ideology of instrumental and efficient communication and behavior. But for a quick, useful introduction to Heidegger and Habermas and a quick critical perspective on the emergent wired world, this book does a very good job.