I have sectioned my literature Review into seven sections; Ontology, Coordination or Style, Our Role as Disclosers, Commitment, Breakdown, Disclosing New Technologies, Designing Disclosure. Have a look at my problem statement here.

Disclosing New Technologies

Any opening of new possibilities closes others, and this is especially true of the introduction of technology. In providing a tool, we will change the nature of how people use the tool and the materials within it (Flores & Winograd, 1987).

Technology in this broad sense imposes a framework or structure, through which we understand the world. In a sense, this treats all being as resource or inventory a status that covers over the being that is disclosed. (Heidegger, 1977) What Heidegger is saying, is in the modern world, we no longer experience being as it disclosed itself to earlier times of human beings. At all times, in history being has disclosed itself and also concealed itself meaning we understand some things and not others.

Heidegger claims that in our age, there is this new threat to our understanding of being. He believed that Being was shrunk to what is present and the present moment is dependent on the minds ideas. Heidegger saw this as a problem because all understanding of being was dependent on a stagnant moment in an ever changing system, which led to false understanding and concepts being disclosed.

Heidegger found that the philosophical tradition destroys the fact that being discloses itself or any possibility of thinking about that in any deep way. Our job, or way is to think that, without destroying or diminishing it.

Heidegger (1977) does not mean we must overcome technology, he does not mean we must reject or destroy it. He rather reminds one that returning to the concealed truth that technology has covered over is what we need to be aware of. Heidegger acknowledges that technology is itself a creative act. Attending to the creative act of the invention of technology can be a way to understand what lies beneath the technology. Whenever something new is created we immediately get so concerned with the created artefact, or with the new technology, that we forget the being, that lies under it. The technology fascinates us and diverts our attention to pass over without noticing its origin. What we need is not the absence of technology, but sensitivity to what is originally being disclosed by the creation and use of the technology.

Being itself must grant en-framing – Heidegger says our technological en-framing of the world, has itself been granted by being. Being has granted us remarkable new means, in which we are able to ignore new being, by which being is more and more obscured.

In the very heart of our greatest mistakes – that is the place to look, Heidegger reminds us that it is our task to turn that moment into unconcealment. It is this space that we try to comprehend what we have forgotten and what is been concealed from us.

Technology allows us to show each other our dreams, our imaginations or our experiences. As an example, we will look at computer gaming, Players are immersed and taking part in a series of activities, thought up by a team of humans who have imagined and co-created a world.

Technology enables us to share our imagined structures with each other. It allows us a clear extension of communication, where we can allow others to experience what we are communicating rather than restricting our articulation to the boundaries of language. Technology now allows us to share much more of ourselves, and way of being. The heart of this work consists of coordinating human activity within a fold of experience – or ontology.