The Quasi-Face of the Cell Phone: Rethinking Alterity and Screens

Why does a cell phone have a screen? From televisions and cell phones to refrigerators, many contemporary technologies come with a screen. The article aims at answering this question by employing Emmanuel Levinas' notions of the Other and the face. This article also engages with Don Ihde's...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Human studies 2014-09, Vol.37 (3), p.299-316
Main Author: Wellner, Galit
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Alterity
Cell phones
Cellular telephones
Concept formation
Concept of being
Conceptualization
Education
Face
Hands
Heidegger, Martin
Heideggerianism
History of technology
Humans
Interiority
Levinas, Emmanuel
Machinery
Mobile phones
Modern Philosophy
Ontology
Otherness
Phenomenology
Philosophical Paper
Philosophy
Philosophy of the Social Sciences
Political Philosophy
Sociolinguistics
Technology
Telephone communications
Telephones
Television
Theoretical
THEORETICAL / PHILOSOPHICAL PAPER
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Summary:Why does a cell phone have a screen? From televisions and cell phones to refrigerators, many contemporary technologies come with a screen. The article aims at answering this question by employing Emmanuel Levinas' notions of the Other and the face. This article also engages with Don Ihde's conceptualization of alterity relations, in which the technological acts as quasi-other with which we maintain relations. If technology is a quasi-other, then, I claim, the screen is the quasi-face. By exploring Levinas' ontology, specifically what can be identified as his tool analysis, as well as his notion of the face, a new understanding of contemporary technologies can be extracted. Some of these technologies hardly fit into the Heideggerian notion of the hand as the main interface to artifacts. Instead they require the face. Levinas' notion of the face is analyzed from an ontological perspective and developed in conjunction with the screen. As the screen serves as a quasi-face, it enables the construction of quasi-other technological artifacts.
ISSN:0163-8548
1572-851X
DOI:10.1007/s10746-013-9304-y