Heidegger, Dwelling, Television, and the Internet

Caterina – cofounder of flickr, writer, blogger, and a lot of other things – swept me off my feet with this blog. She has this elegant way of writing about Heideggerrian dwelling, for one thing. I also wonder who wants to chime in about her thesis, rather innocuously placed near the end of the blog, that the internet has become for us (in a way that TV never could) a kind of dwelling?

from caterina.net:

Heidegger, Dwelling Television, Weblogs

Stewart and I talked about getting a TV last week, then decided (again) not to. I’ve never owned a TV. That is not strictly true — I actually own a TV now, but I’ve never turned it on and it is being employed as a clothes rack. This made me think of Heidegger.

Heidegger and Bachelard provided the theoretical underpinnings for my thesis which was about space and poetry, mainly Heidegger’s Poetry, Language, Thought, his essay/lecture Building, Dwelling, Thinking, and Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space. Heidegger drew this distinction between “dwelling” — creating a place where you feel at home both physically and spiritually — and “inhabiting” — taking shelter or merely occupying a house. This dwelling was more ontological than spatial, and the dwelling itself a place of withdrawal from the public into the private realm. Heidegger saw technology as falsifying modern existence, and called modern architecture “a machine for living” — substituting technology for what had been primarily a state of being. As a result, we moderns find ourselves assailed by constant public noise and information, unable to sustain a private reverie necessary to “dwell”. There’s been an institutionalized triumph of the public over the private — I suddenly think of that great-creepy Roxy Music song In Every Dream Home a Heartache — in the great suburban estrangement, our tracks through the mass-produced and market-driven Levittown floorplans identical to that of our neighbors, but separate and walled, and inhibiting dwelling.

So the TV is the final incursion of the public realm into the private and the end of the home as temple of meditation and seclusion, and this is all a very roundabout way of saying I don’t really want a TV. Somehow, though, computers are OK, I find it much easier to “dwell” on the internet than in TV — probably because this weblog is the locus of my online dwelling.

~ by Shane Waggoner on January 8, 2009.