motion. One sees "through" the screen rather than seeing "on" the screen. Add multiplayer capacity: in the case of the opaque mode, reading and writing (from the previous keyboard mode), now becomes alternating, with my messages going out, but the others' coming in as in chats, blogs, tweets, and the like, or real-time email. Reading/writing alternate; switch to DVDs on the screen, and the tablet becomes cinema. I could go on extensively, but here I am merely pointing to the high degree of multistability the visual display screen has, which is very different from any of the previous writing technologies. The same applies to multitasking, which is the productive version of multistability. The "station" where the user engages the now-computerized system can today reach around the world, engage in many different activities, and yet remain aware of his or her bodily locatedness as well. As for composing by word processing, by the time I left the dean's office in 1990, 85 percent of the large English faculty composed by word processing, according to a poll I undertook.

It remains the case that bodily skills, acquired, honed, perfected, are called for here as well. I am all too aware that my youngest son far exceeds me in such electronic and computer skills, and it is him that I call for help more often than he would like. But, I have now abandoned doing books in BC (before computers) mode entirely; I find that all my composition today is produced electronically. Indeed, I can no longer type easily at all on a mechanical typewriter—it is simply too frustrating and slow, let alone not allowing me to click a few keys and break off to Google something I need to know.

Back to Heidegger: I have clearly been trying to show that to valorize one preferred style or technology of writing is to be phenomenologically arbitrary. My suspicion is that as is common among musicians, a favorite type or even favorite particular instrument can be preferred by an individual—and this is understandable. It is rare for a musician to attain virtuosity on a large variety of different instruments, in part precisely because it takes so much time, practice, and skill acquisition to reach transparent virtuosity that within this narrow range it is certainly genuine to extol the favored skills-plus-instrument of the case. It is different, of course, to secondarily appreciate or admire exactly this human-instrument interrelation as an observer or auditor, as in my Kinhaven example. But, phenomenologically, it seems clear to me that there can be virtuosity—and authenticity—in each of the variations of human-writing technologies I have examined. Yet, these also display different patterns of selectivity, of amplification and reduction, such that not everything can be expressed as well or at all, in each variant. One size does not fit all.


134 ■ Concluding Postphenomenological Postscript


Don Ihde - Heidegger's Technologies - Postphenomenological Perspectives