Description
Book SynopsisAn analysis of the history and social role of mobile phones today (with an enhancement of their primary writing function) is followed by a proposal of a philosophical theory of objects, which is meant to be complementary to Searle’s ‘collective intentionality’, that places writing at the basis of social reality.
Trade Review"Where Are You? An Ontology of the Cell Phone offers an ontology and phenomenology of the cell phone that draws as easily on popular culture and our daily experience of the cell phone, as it does on Ferrari's considerable philosophical culture. In one moment, Ferraris speculates how differently the ending of Dr. Zhivago might have played out in the age of the cell phone, and in the next, argues that the cell phone is the absolute emblem of the age not of the triumph of the image, as has so often been claimed, but of 'the explosion of writing.'" -- -Barbara Spackman University of California, Berkeley "Ferraris' book does what good philosophy always did: it interprets the world where we live making the mundane critically visible. When most people still assumed that mobile phones would mark the triumph of oral communication, Ferraris took the chance to put his philosophy to test and predict the triumph of writing, over speaking, in the new technological world. Contracts, weddings, and all the other Social Objects-- material products of our ability to write and record-- take the central stage in a philosophical move that gives back to the virtual its reality. For the initiated, Ferraris reopens the debate between Searl and Derrida without the animosity of the original participants, proving that under the discussion there was true substance and that both authors are as relevant today as they were in the early seventies. The book should be an elective reading for iOS and Android fans alike and a required text for philosophers, literary critics and telecommunication engineers." -- -Emanuel Rota University of Illinois
Table of ContentsForeword by Umberto Eco Where Are You? The Pharaoh's Mobile Phone Writing Recording Constructing Realism and Textualism Weak Textualism Notes Index
