Boredom and Technology

Heidegger defined ‘human’ as ‘being-in-time’, and sitting through time allows one to engage in philosophic thought. But sitting is boring, and what a waste, when you could be watching tv. Heidegger, according to Leslie Paul Thiele, thought boredom was the evil mood of our technological age, because it stops one from thinking. Thiele suggests that technology is the cause of and the relief from boredom.

Thiele writes: “Modern technology assails time in its effort to speed through atomic, global, and cosmic space, and by accelerating daily routines and functions. This victory over time bears a price: humanity comes to relate to time as an obstacle and antagonist, as a recalcitrant force that demands harnessing. The effect of technological innovation, in other words, is not so much the saving of time as its conquest” (505).

Time is too valuable to waste. There is a relationship here to Marx’s idea of commodity fetishism which suggests that in our modern capitalist society everything is termed according to spending value, time included. Lefebvre also discusses the mastery over time as part of our conquest over space in his influential work, the Production of Space.

I think Thiele is onto something that Marx and Lefebvre missed. It isn’t that we are actively trying to lay claim to everything we see. Well maybe some people are. But the rest of us, normal calm and easy going people, we are just trying to make a living and have a little fun before kicking the bucket.

“Boredom becomes the habitual and hegemonic, which is to say unacknowledged and unchallenged, mood of the technological age” (512).

But Thiele is also wrong. Sure, we use technology to escape boredom. We can’t stand to be bored, we lack patience for it, and time is too valuable to waste. Yet Thiele’s argument puts people on the vulnerable-to-evil-technology side, which condescends to the audience and suggests that people don’t know what’s good for them. The hypodermic theory etc, but an interesting idea nonetheless.

see: Thiele, Leslie Paul. "Postmodernity and the Routinization of Novelty: Heidegger on Boredom and Technology." Polity
29.4 (Summer, 1997), pp. 489-517. Available on JSTOR