Two true stories. After sitting down on a bus, a girl of about ten takes a vacated seat with her father and little brother at her sides, and then pulls out a paper fortune teller she obviously made herself. She asks two women sitting across the way for colours and numbers, working the folds in the fortune teller once they answer. Both were clearly amused as the girl told them their futures. There was something strange in this scene: strangers talking on a bus in a good-natured way. But there was equally something missing.

A couple of weeks later, four students sit at a round table in a busy cafeteria at the university where I teach. They’re chatting, joking, and like the people on the bus, happy to be there. But about a foot or so in front of their faces they’re holding smartphones like cherished religious icons, repeatedly glancing at them during their conversation. Their talk takes place around, over, and through their iPhones, now an essential part of their worlds. They can’t leave home without them.

These parables illustrate two modes of being, the former slowly fading away, the latter triumphant, like soldiers marching in a parade as their dictator waves from his palatial balcony.

Husserl, Heidegger and the Digital World

Two ideas from my largely wasted philosophical adventures come to mind here: Edmund Husserl’s concept of the Lebenswelt, or Lifeworld, and Martin Heidegger’s idea of Dasein (being there) as a fundamental mode of Being-in-the-World.