Machine Bureaucracy and Planetary Humanity: A Dialogical Understanding of Personhood for the Development of Identities in the Electronic Age
Keywords:
Planetary humanity, Rosenstock-Huessy, electronic age, identity, dialogue, biography, personhoodAbstract
In this contribution it will first be explored what pressure a machine bureaucratic society puts on the development of personal identities. Related to this the meaning of a dialogical understanding of personhood will be explored. It will be shown, how dialogue understood as responsiveness towards others and as participating in the ongoing conversation of human history makes human beings more complete, whereas machine bureaucracies tend to reduce the full potential of human beings and being human. It will be shown how information technology is at the crossroads of both tendencies. In developing this dialogical understanding of personhood the focus will be on the philosophy of living speech of Rosenstock-Huessy since he gave the most articulate presentation of it. Finally some consequences of this approach for the design and moral evaluation of information systems will be proposed.
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Copyright (c) 2008 Otto Kroesen

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