Holding Onto Reality

Holding Onto Reality

For me, Holding On to Reality, by , does just that: grabs on to the realest, most relatable ideas about the Information Age, and refuses to let go. I have had a difficult time talking and writing about Borgmann. For our class listserv responses, I felt like I had nothing to comment on. In our class discussions, I had a hard time figuring out what everyone was talking about. Borgmann’s writing style (and diction and even content) is clear and straightforward, and it leaves me at a loss for anything to interpret or explicate. Borgmann writes sentences like “Social critics and information theorists are divided on whether information is the devil or the Second Coming” and “Information through the power of technology steps forward as a rival of reality” (6, 2). And I cannot see how there is anything more to say.

So, I would like to write about those of Borgmann’s ideas (in this book) that I find most striking. First, it is interesting to note that Borgmann utilizes many of the ideas articulated by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in Metaphors We Live By.

If we think of information as a relation—intelligence provided, a person is informed by a sign about some thing in a certain context—we can hardly fail to notice that in a hypertrophically informed society like ours the sign looms large….We are so used to the mass and sophistication of our vehicles and containers of information that a society without them seems primitive and incomplete. (38)

Lakoff and Johnson’s metaphoric containers, used so often in speech, writing, and conceptualization of abstract concepts, carry over into Borgmann’s world of information. Borgmann’s information signs are his containers. In the oral culture that Borgmann wri...

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... of the Internet and the Information Age in our lives. He writes, “Information is about to overflow and suffocate reality” (213). With the invention or development of new technological devices or advances every day, this suffocation seems imminent. With the Palm Pilot, the DVD player, with cellular phones that check e-mail and computers that play movies, with all the newer technologies with which I am not yet even familiar, the world seems almost scary. With all of these avenues for accessing, transmitting, and generating information, the pace and the amount of information sent will steadily increase until we, as mere humans, are overloaded. Borgmann makes me aware of the frightening possibility that these signs we rely on to orient and direct us in everyday life will soon become so many that they will begin to contradict one another. Where will that leave us?