Borgmann: The Device Paradigm

Growing up, we only ever had one TV that could watch one channel at a time. And so, this meant we would have fights about who could watch what and when. But it also meant that we would watch TV together. We huddled on the sofa. We laughed together, we cried together, and we bonded. These days, with streaming services across ten different devices, there's no need to have a scheduling battle. But there's also no need to huddle on the sofa and bond. This is an example of what Albert Borgmann calls a device paradigm. We often see technologies in terms of what they actually do, so fire gives us warmth, a pen allows us to write, and a TV lets us watch a programme. But Borgmann argues that almost all widely uptaken technologies create their own social behaviours and practices. People huddle around a fire, and they talk, or they swap stories. People pause to think about what they are writing when they are writing by hand. A family bonds as they watch TV. The problem is that when these technologies are replaced by more efficient things, central heating, emails, or Netflix, we lose the social practices that were doing us good. This is not a nostalgic kind of Ludditism. I love central heating and YouTube, but it asks us to focus on what we miss when we lose or swap out a technology, and then we can be more intentional about things. We can find another way to swap stories and to be with our family. A technology might allow us to do one thing better, but we then need to find other ways to do the unseen, forgotten things that it once enabled.