A critical reflection on the ontological impact of the integration of technology into everyday life

Abstract

This study addresses the intersection between Martin Heidegger’s phenomenology — which describes modern technology as an enframing that transforms the world into a quantifiable reserve (Ge-stell), reducing ontological openness to the pre-determined — and Luciano Floridi’s philosophy of information, which characterizes the hyper-historical process as a stage in which third-order technologies — operating autonomously — position the human being as an external beneficiary of a loop of processes. This convergence reveals how the integration of digital technology, from the earliest Web protocols to the ecosystem of the Internet of Things (IoT) and Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), can reconfigure everyday experience by shortening geographical distances and connecting people, but also by homogenizing interactions and suppressing the encounter with the other. The central objective is to examine how these external structures influence existential dynamics, in order to question how technology transforms the human relation with the world, which potentially occurs in an instantaneous and flattened manner. The methodology is qualitative and bibliographical, promoting a dialectical articulation between Heideggerian technology (Ge-stell) and Floridian infosphere: while modern technology operates through the illusion of proximity without true proximity (Nähe), the hyper-historical stage engenders the onlife experience, a hybrid world unfolding beyond the online/offline dichotomy. The findings point to a tension in which technology enables humans to escape their routine, inviting a more attentive dwelling in the infosphere and fostering self-critique regarding their own experiences.