Eco-imagination and digitalisation of the world: a methodological approach

HERNÁN INVERSO

MILÁN

Congreso; Eco-Imagination for a Sustainable Future; 2022

World Phenomenological Institute

The advancement of technoscience has put us at a crossroads in the context of planetary risk. Many changes happened with incredible speed compared with the experience of previous generations, and we feel thrown into a future of growing digitalisation. A considerable part of the world population depends on digital tools for labour and feels social networks as a central part of their daily lives. Indeed, the traditional boundary between real and virtual sounds increasingly outdated. This erasure opens up countless questions about the effects of these changes on our relationship with the world as a whole. At the same time, the growing empathy for digital environments goes hand in hand with distancing from the experience of nature, reducing our environmental awareness. However, the planetary risk requires thinking about this fracture that breaks our understanding of the world. In fact, common sense tends to distinguish the digital domain from the natural environment as if they were different and even incompatible areas. Thus, our experience seems to be tied to one or the other, with no possibility of integration. Similarly, the reflection on this field has separated the philosophy of technology from ecological studies deepening this division. The result seems to be a dark destiny of human anguish and inner fracture in the face of an irreconcilable rupture. But this is only part of the picture. This presentation aims at sketching out my current research project developed in the framework of a Marie Curie Fellowship at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, which turns toward phenomenology to stress the need to go beyond old schemes that fit poorly in our times. Instead, it reassesses the problem of the phenomenological method to offer a reinterpretation of the relationship between human beings and their surroundings, revealing the belonging of the virtual realm and the environment to the same type of phenomenon. In this way, it recovers the pristine double dimension of our relationship with both aspects of the experience. This integrated view throws light on our attitude towards digitalising the world and the environment, revealing the mechanisms of empathy and estrangement that guide our behaviour.