Where are you? A heideggerian analysis of the mobile phone

• Autor(a) principal: Ilharco, Fernando
• Data de Publicação: 2007
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.14/10380
• topic: Communication; Heidegger; Information technology; Mobile phone; Ontology; Phenomenology; Comunicação; Fenomenologia; Ontologia; Tecnologia de informação; Telemóvel

This paper is an attempt at clarifying the essential contours of the phenomenon that grounds the developments in contemporary mobile communication: the mobile phone. In so doing our investigation intends to answer the question of what a mobile phone is as such. The paper presents a description of the mobile phone and its contextualisation within some of the works of Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), seeking to uncover the essential mode in which a mobile phone is what it is. Grounding our analysis on the ontology of Heidegger’s Being and Time (Heidegger 1962), we claim that the mobile phone will only show itself as what it is in its being in-the-world where mobile phones are what they are. This analysis is complemented by an exploration of the relevance of another of Heidegger’s notions, that of Ge-stell (Heidegger 1977) as the essence of modern technology, for the understanding of human involvement with mobile phones. Against this ontological background, our analysis points out being-with, bringing together and timing as the essential contours of the mobile phone, all of these suggesting the deeper notions of actual situation and of disembodiment.