The Primacy of Action: Technologies and the Lifeworld

This project investigates the question "how does information- & communication technologies shape the forms of learning and construction of meaning." This is handled by first claiming that it cannot be investigated without having a clearly defined general concept of technology; and then by claiming that we also need to understand our relation to technology in our environment (lifeworld), that is, the role and function of technology; which, finally, requires a thorough understanding of the self and intersub jectivity in relation with technology. In this regard the function of technology is understood in a two-fold manner, as organized and organizing principle. The former expresses technology as a lifeworld structure, embodying coping-with-the-world, for inst ance the way a refrigerator can be said to be an embodiment of a preservation-of-food praxis. The latter expresses how utilization of technology's affordances scaffolds individual understanding and the construction of new praxis. The two-foldedness theref ore express that technology both is a meaning-structure, and is influential in the creation of new meaning-structures. The function of technology can therefore be described as articulation of actual and possible meaning. In an approach well known from Phe nomenology, both a self and a lifeworld are disclosed through embeddedness: Our knowledge of ourselves is intimately connected to our engagement in our surroundings, and our knowledge of our surroundings is intimately connected to our engagement in them. An action-based hermeneutical theory of meaning develops from the theory on the self: Meaning is dependent on action in an already meaningful world, a lifeworld. And importantly, actions are undertaken through the lifeworld's technologies. We therefore, i n accordance with the two-foldedness of technology, both use and create meaning through the application of technology, and nowadays ICT's especially are important and increasingly unavoidable in this endeavor.