Technology and Alienation

Abstract

Chapter 3 “Technology and Alienation” explores the downsides and potential alienating effects of immersion in a high-tech world, as well as possibilities for dis-alienation and empowerment. The developing countries are currently undergoing a perhaps unprecedented technological revolution that has given new credence and life to the concept of alienation after a period of relative decline in which Marxian, existentialist, and other modern discourses were replaced with postmodern perspectives skeptical or critical of the concept of alienation. In this paper, I want to suggest that digital information and communication technologies and the restructuring of global capitalism require us to rethink the problematics of technology and alienation. If it is true that we are undergoing a Great Transformation, one of the epochal shifts within the history of capitalism, that digital technologies and social media are taking us into a novel field of cultural experience, and that the very nature of human identity and social relations are changing, then obviously we need to develop fresh theories to analyze these changes and politics to respond to them