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Take the automobile, something that has certainly become more device-like with time. The days when automobiles called forth skill and even a kind of "focal practice" from their owners—the days when fathers taught their sons the workings of a V8 and people changed their own oil—are pretty much gone.
But is the monotonous ubiquity of an advanced device all there is to a car? You might think so after reading Borgmann. "There is at least a drowsy and perhaps even a dawning sense in the contemporary culture that the paradigmatic blessings of technology are vacuous," he writes in Power Failure, underlining his point with this sardonic comment on a car advertisement: "Driving a car is not really an event that provokes us to shouts of 'Wow!' and 'Sweet!'"
Well. Such sweeping empirical claims are dangerous territory for philosophers. It all depends on the car. Borgmann has apparently never been in a Mini Cooper, bmw's revival of the classic—and tiny—British coupe. As I recall, both "Wow!" and "Sweet!" were words that came out of my mouth during my first ride. Indeed, one of the fascinating characteristics of the Mini is the delight it inspires even in passersby, let alone passengers and drivers. To drive a Mini is to enter a strange, altered universe where nearly everyone is smiling, not to mention staring, at you. (My few trips in a Mini have given me a taste of what it must be like to be exceptionally physically attractive.) And the Mini, like some other cars before it, is capable of inspiring loyalty, meticulous care, and even—online and in cities across the continent—a kind of community.
At some point the Mini's appeal may fade. And Borgmann provides other, more compelling examples of technology's vacuous pleasures. Yet there is something troubling about Borgmann's apparent insensitivity to the pleasures that come from that certain kind of device that inspires respect, admiration, and even awe in and of itself—that is, as a kind of focal thing. What do we make of machinery that, far from retiring to the background like an unobtrusive English butler, becomes part of the family?
One such device, exhibiting all the characteristics of Borgmann's devices and yet also reversing the usual technological pattern, is already on the market and is likely to become ubiquitous in the next decade: the digital video recorder (DVR), currently best known under the brand name TiVo.
The TiVo is a Borgmann-style device par excellence. True to type, on five sides it is a blank gray box, the essence of simplicity. The complexity is inside: one or two beefed-up hard drives and a stripped-down computer running the Linux operating system. Only the back of the unit, with no less than 19 jacks for audio and video cables, exposes the device's complexity to its user. Once the cables have been successfully connected, the TiVo sits between its owner's television service (cable, satellite dish, or antenna) and the television itself. It then puts its capacious hard drives to work recording television programs its owner wants to watch, much like a VCR—and yet with improvements over the VCR that make it a revolutionary, not evolutionary device.
As Borgmann shrewdly observes, every technological advance is promoted in terms of some combination of liberation ("You no longer have to …") and empowerment ("Now you can …"). The TiVo makes both sets of promises. The most remarkable liberation it delivers is from time. Once the TiVo starts recording a program, you can watch the program whenever you want—and stop watching whenever you want, resuming later if you wish. You can pause, fast-forward, and rewind, just as you would with a movie—which also means you can fast-forward through commercials.
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