Philosophizing the Jobs’s iPhone within Philospohical Hermeneutics Context

• Main Author: Daphne Vidanec
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Athens Institute for Education and Research 2020-07-01
• Series: Athens Journal of Humanities & Arts
• Online Access: https://www.athensjournals.gr/humanities/2020-7-3-1-Vidanec.pdf

Charles Taylor, worldwide known contemporary Canadian thinker holds a stand that people “grasp their life in a narrative”. Following his conception of narrative notably explicated within identity discussion context in Charles Taylor’s remarkable Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (HUP 1989), we might think of a narrative as an unavoidable form that shapes one’s private and professional relationships. Especially, the last one is recognizable in the modern world of high-tech and digitally mediated business (and relations). Within these lines the author primarily aiming to establish methodological base for understanding the concept of digital narrative, which is proposed by the master of digital smart technology and an inventor of i-Phone (2007): Steve Jobs. The author’s thesis is, that, as highlight of 21st c. modern technologies, Steve Jobs’s iPhone represents more than a mere ‘money-can-buy-product’. With its app(s)-designed, a cell phone of a kind as i-Phone certainly is represents an idea of one’s personal (digital) identity. In order to show how philosophy can shape human private and professional practice in the digital era, the two philosopher’s outlooks will be proposed in the following pages. The author’s start-position is that human life sphere in the digital age takes shape through manifold technological influences produced and launched by public and digital media (e. g. TV, Internet, radio, smart-phones, iPads etc.) as well as through other forms of the whole range of high technologies, what has, consequentially, changed human agency and the picture of what personal identity is. This elaboration tends to answer the two: (1) the nature of narrative within one’s personal identity shaping by following theoretical positions of the two brilliant thinkers: Charles Taylor and Paul Ricoeur and (2) the meaning of narrated identities within the context of human agency shaped by strong digital communication mediated by i(Phone)-technology?