The Invisibility of Technology
Perhaps the best-known example of the capacity of our technologies to become "invisible" is Martin Heidegger's description of the blind person's cane: that cane, Heidegger maintains, becomes more than a tool by which the blind person moves around; it becomes an extension of that person's arm.
Education critic C. A. Bowers draws on Heidegger's discussion of technology to make the point that "the essential nature of the technology selects the aspects of the experience that will be amplified and reduced" (Bowers 1988, 32). In this way, Bowers argues, the technology becomes more than a tool: it acts on us as well. Bowers uses eyeglasses as his example, pointing out that eyeglasses "select and amplify our vision"; he also points to the pencil as a tool that "amplifies our ability to record our thoughts in a manner that allows us to achieve distance and view them objectively" (32-33). In a sense, this is similar to the claim, on a smaller scale, made by McLuhan, Ong, and others who argue that writing changes the sensual configuration of communication from a primarily oral and aural experience to a visual one. But the relevant point here is that a tool like the pencil, according to Bowers, "determines what aspects of experience will be reduced; the pencil, for example, cannot communicate our voice or bring greater acuity to our ability to see or smell" (33). This is not to say that the pencil determines specific outcomes or consequences by its use; rather, it is to underscore that the nature of the technology has specific and often identifiable influences on our experience.
Bowers suggests that the potential of the computer as a technology to shape experience is vast. Considering the power of computer technology, how multi-faceted its uses, and the astonishing speed with which it has been integrated into economic and cultural life in the past two decades, it is reasonable to expect that computers, in their various manifestations, will become ever more invisible to us even as they become ever more central to how we live in and experience the world.
At the moment, however, many uses of computer technologies are still novel enough that we can "see" some of their powerful effects and thus begin to understand these effects on our ways of being-in-the-world.