According to a long-standing thesis, our basic tools can be seen as extending the powers of our bodies. The club extends the power of the forelimb to strike, the telescope the power of the eye to see far distances, the automobile the power of the hind-limbs to carry us over level terrain. In these terms, it might be argued that that which ties all the uses of the computer together is that it extends our powers of language in all directions: formal, musical, pictorial. A technician may claim this on the basis of how they work. My suggestion is that such a family resemblance is discernible in the non-technical experience of what they are for.

Yet, second, such discernment is not everyone's experience. This leads to a second problem in the contrast of the computer with everyday hand-tools. In the case of simple hand tools there is no critical leap in understanding between what the instrument is for and how it works, and our understanding of these is not separate from a rough image of how the instrument looks. This is so in part because such tools have their origins in primitive everyday experience. (It took no special or extraordinary insight on the part of son at 8-months old to discern what a hammer was for, without ever having seen one used.) However, with the instruments of more advanced technology (e.g., automobiles, TV sets), one can well understand adequately what it is for, and use it, without knowing specifically how it works. And in some cases, one can even know how the instrument works without having any particular image of what one might actually look like. This is clearly evident in the case of the computer. Historically, the term "computer" referred first to a concept or logical construct rather than to a percept. One could well understand what a computer was without ever having seen one and without at the same time imagining how its instantiation in actual hardware would look. This reflects both what actually happened historically with the development of the computer, and how computers are typically explained in technical manuals. Conversely, once it is part of the visible equipment of our world, the computer refers also to a percept, and one can use the computer in many ways without really understanding how it works. (With some irony, an illusion of thinking one knows how it works has been fostered recently by the transparent I-Mac line–if you see the insides its no longer a so mysterious).

Yet, even as a logical construct capable of different embodiments, the computer is determined as a tool by the kinds of its in-order-to references, not by an account of how it works, or rather an in-order-to reference is built into the account of how it works. Since my concern is how in use the artifact can mediate between ourselves and the world, and so reflects back upon the character of our experience, I shall proceed from what is accessible in and through the perceptible instantiation and uses of the microcomputer. Still, in technically uninformed experience there may well be no insight beyond use through a materially instantiated artifact. Hence the user might not at all recognize different material instantiations as embodiments of the one logical construct, the computer in its working being virtually a "black box." Yet, existentially, these various instanitations are their constituted references; it is that which makes them usable.

This suggests a third issue already alluded to. In order for the computer to emerge as a tool not only must there be things that admit if computation (in the broadest sense), along with both the conceptual sophistication to devise the appropriate computational procedures and the technical sophistication to effect the means, but understanding things in computational terms must already be intelligible within our ruling paradigm of knowledge and our conceptual schemes.

Implicit in the preceding discussion is a particular conception of essence. The question of what a microcomputer is is understood not in terms of how it works, nor how it is used, but in terms of the in-order-to references that make possible how it is used.

On the standard view, the computer is simply a tool, more complex and protean than others, but a tool nonetheless. On those terms, one can confidently claim that "the computer does not impose upon us the ways in which it should be used." This does admit the possibility of good and bad uses (and so is not blind to the possibilities of tyrannous control of human beings) but it puts the choice of alternatives squarely in our hands. To argue that the computer does impose its uses would in this view be rejected as a blatant mystification. It is only cranks, mystics and technophobes who turn what is after all a human product into an hypostatized fetish, dispensing an unhappy fate. However correct on the face of it, this view is limited in two decisive respects.

First, though we do indeed have instruments at our disposal and it is we who decide upon uses, there is an important sense in which instruments are "non-neutral," namely, that there is already in having them on hand for use, a mediation of experience, that is, a specific organizing and focusing of experience in one way as opposed to others. This mediation is at work prior to the decision to use the tool toward this or that specific end and prior to the determination of the beneficial or harmful effects of this or that use. This mediation itself works at two levels. First, in the very use of the instrument, our relation to the world, to other people and to ourselves, is transformed by the kind of tool used prior to the meaning of the specific content of use. For example, the TV organizes and focuses our experience, puts us in relation to the world and to each other in certain sorts of ways that transcend the specific programming content. This does not mean that some TV is not better and some worse for certain ends, that creative programming is not a worthwhile endeavor, etc., but only that the modes of our experience are transformed already, regardless of whether we watch Green Acres’ re-runs or Masterpiece theater. Similarly, the telephone already alters our experiential relation to the world, regardless of what we choose to say over it. The sense of this thesis was captured in Marshall McCluhan's (both celebrated and maligned) dictum: "The medium is the message." Second, whether we actually use an instrument or not, a transformation of experience is implicated in one's having the tool on hand for use. It is not that the use has specific palpably effects, but that in the potential for use there is implicated already a specific way of looking at things which, once realized, is then reinforced by continued successful use.

This points to a second way in which the thesis of the neutrality of instruments is limited. All use of instruments, or the potential for use that lies in having the instrument in principle ready-to-hand, takes place in a multifaceted context--an ontic context inscribed in things and their interrelationships, of particular people, artifacts, documents, physical settings, economic and productive imperatives, communicative and discursive practices, relations of power, and an ontological context of lived meanings in various worlds and the overriding interpretive framework that gives sense to things as such and as a whole. To understand the existential meaning of an instrument, we must ask about the context of use, and not just the physical arrangement of people and things, but what in the prevailing mind-set and outlook makes the instrument possible and its use plausible and appropriate. Speaking of the microcomputer, a Canadian educator Ronald Ragsdale warns his fellow pedagogues of what he terms "the hammer effect." Roughly stated, the effect is this:

Now, since educators are not two-year olds, Ragsdale is sanguine about controlling the effect. Leaving aside the issue that what is for us a "hammer" having a certain limited range of specific in-order-to references might well be for a two-year old something else, and that in virtue precisely of the protean character of the computer many things can seem to suffer computing without the palpable damage that the household suffers from the hammering toddler, or that Ragsdale, making consultant money producing educational software has a vested interest in appearing sanguine about limiting the effect--though perhaps this last point should not be set aside so quickly, since it reveals something of the effective context of current computer use. There are not billions of dollars in R&D money devoted to hammer research; there are no endowed chairs of "hammering science" in our universities and technical institutes; there is no public hysteria about "hammer illiteracy"; no proclamations about the new age of the "hammer based society"; no economically vital hammer industry; no claim that hammer efficiency is progressive and forward looking, that it is socially necessary and beneficial, that it provides the benchmark of intellectual facility; no explicit or even tacit belief that in hammering and hammering "science" lie the fulfillment of Western philosophy. In such a context, to keep the hammer in hand, as it were, and to curb the hammer effect would not require that much effort. To curb the effect with respect to the computer, however, would seem Herculean if not quixotic.

Consideration of the essence and meaning of the microcomputer will thus proceed at two levels. At the first, we consider abstractly in terms of the essential structures of experience how the use of the instrument can mediate between ourselves and the world. At the level, we situate the abstract analysis more concrete by considering the cultural/historical context in which these possible mediations take place.

A useful phenomenological model for interpreting existentially the experience/instrument correlation has been provided by Don Ihde. He focuses upon our non-technical experience of instruments, and charts the essential ways in which that experience can be structured, depending upon the relation of the instrument to the user. He identifies three such relations:

a) Embodiment Relations: These are the relations in which we experience the world through the instrument. In other words, in normal efficient use the instrument functions as a more or less transparent extension of our selves. It is the means through which we experience in a particular focused way. A good carpenter attends to the nail and in the process of hammering the hammer itself becomes more or less one with his or her hand. A good pair of eye-glasses disclose to us a world of vision transformed from that of our unaided sight, but the glasses themselves in their proper functioning disappear in the experience.

b) Hermeneutic relations: These are the relations in which in normal efficient use the instrument is experienced as a focal object . For example, the instrument can be, as is the case with a television, more or less translucent, that is, the set lies within our perceptual field but our perceptual focus is upon the sounds and pictures presented. The instrument may also be more or less opaque, as in those cases (e.g., a tape measure) when we read from it.

c) Background relations: Instruments in this case serves by and large as part of a technological environment (e.g., lighting, climate control, acoustical engineering).

It is in these terms that Ihde identities the primary structures of instrumental transformation. The experienced use of an instrument brings with it both a selection of a certain range of bare perceptual experience and a simultaneous amplification of certain possibilities of experience and a reduction of others. More specifically, from the entire range of possible human experience, the use of a tool selects a specific range. For example, from the full range of face to face experience, the use of the telephone selects the sub-range of auditory, amplifying this dimension of our experience and reducing others. Yet, along with this selection, the instrument itself has its own intrinsic imperatives, what Ihde calls "telic inclinations." In ways appropriate to the instrument itself, its use favors certain ways of acting, experiencing, understanding as opposed to others. Keeping to the telephone example, its use favors the exchange of information (Cf. the recent British Postal Service advertisement, where the lad, becoming tongue tied on the telephone, can only say "I love you" in a letter.) I use the term "favor" deliberately. Instruments incline us to certain uses, but there is no rigid determination. One can, for example, carry on whatever sort of conversation one wishes over the telephone. The argument is only that certain sorts of exchanges are favored.

We can see how this would hold for the computer, if we consider human experience on a continuum. At the one end are the unspoken capacities, those that involve body finesse, or pattern recognition or the making of Gestalt judgments. At the other end of the continuum, we have counting, adding sums and more complex calculations, the development of logic trees, deductions, playing simple finite sum games, etc. The use of the microcomputer selects one end of this continuum and amplifies it.

i) In general, it selects and amplifies in both speed and complexity our capacities for information processing, storage, transfer and retrieval, as well as our calculative, deductive factorial and functional analytic experience. At the same time, it reduces proportionally those aspects of experience that involve bodily finesse, Gestalt judgments, the ability to discern explicit and tacit contexts, judgments involving taste and qualitative discrimination, intuition.

ii) It also amplifies what Seymour Papert calls the "mathetic" qualities of our experience, this is, the qualities that pertain to the learning of certain ratiocinatory skills. Here the computer is used to make transparent to the learner problem solving strategies and calculative techniques. One learns by programming, a learning presumed to have wide application. At the same time, such uses reduce those aspects of our experience that we do not order as "problems" to be set and brought under control through procedures of divide and conquer.

iii) The microcomputer amplifies our capacity to produce, manipulate and monitor text in large and small blocks. It does so in a way that is forgiving and easy because deletable. (The motto for an Apple® tutorial "The moving cursor having writ can erase or copy all of it.") It may do so "privately" insofar as production is guarded by a password, or with extreme publicness as we "network." Yet this use reduces the experience of text production through writing as a handicraft, that is, as a process which is indelible and hence once inscribed difficult to erase or change, and which follows the unfolding logic of a topic.

iv) The computer amplifies certain sorts of creative possibilities, for example, programming and systems analysis as a creative challenge, the production of sound and image by means of digital "translation" from programs. Yet it also reduces creative possibilities related to handicraft. (Cf. Prince Charles on architecture and drawing). v) The computer also amplifies the formalizable, referential, translatable experience of language, reducing the contextual, historical disclosive power of language. (Cf. the case of Japan).

These forms of amplification/reduction also favor certain outlooks and ways of experiencing over others: They favor a view of society as a communication network for the transmitting exchange and pooling of information; a view of human beings as complex biological information processing units, "meat machines" in Marvin Minsky’s parlance. Similarly, they favor a view of human thinking as calculation and intelligence as information processing. They favor the replacement of direct contact with information exchange, conversation "networking." They favor an instrumental view of language, that is, as a tool we have at our disposal, essentially nominal in both senses (i.e., made up precise arbitrary signs for naming), a language for designating, enframing, filing, the assumption being that formal languages are better than natural languages because they are more precise tools (i.e., tools of truth). They favor the expectation and demand that our encounters with the world, our day to day dealings should be ordered, logical, commandable (cf. the Dept. Chair who compensates for his administrative incompetence by being a video-game adept). They favor overall the general homogenizing of experience, since computers are put to use to abstract facts to be stored as information by means of univocal and decisive systems of classification, such classification be homogenizing. The claim, of course, is that the computer favors such modes of awareness, not that it causally effects them. Still, if we consider what the non-neutrality of the computer means when situated in the context which, beyond specific technical knowledge and capacities, makes it possible, plausible and its proliferation likely, then the inclination toward these outlooks seems virtually fated.

Clearly, technological innovations and proliferation have their ontic conditions and consequences. As the Walkman® and the portable radio required their transistor, the PC requires its microchip. But the appropriation and effectuation of these innovations requires a certain context. The transistor is appropriated first by the Japanese who, already informed by tradition of aesthetic miniaturization, see the potential for smaller portable appliances. Informed too by a tradition of Zen withdrawal, find appropriate in crowded conditions the sensory withdrawal, asociality and focus of the Walkman®. The computer has the same sort of contextual determinants in the West. The computer is pre-figured in the roots of our civilization, in Athens and Jerusalem. They was a need for theology to cope with the apparent fragmentation of scripture, which as divinely inspired must have an underlying order. Hence the necessity to develop indices, concordances and commentaries, to discern that order. In more arcane circles the task was to find the mysterious key or algorithm that would reveal that order to the initiates. In this respect, the computer is the scholars’ and cabalist’s’ dream, a theme played out with great wit in Umberto Eco's Foucault’s Pendulum. On the other hand, the dominant metaphysics of our culture is one that seeks to order and sort the world in terms of an absolute univocal system of categories, modes of predication. Our obsession is to categorize, to dissect, to reveal the secret of things not only in words but according to the structure of language. Not Turing, but Aristotle is the true progenitor of the computer, for he is the patron saint of filing.

Against this background, the computer came into its own after WW II, when under the threat of nuclear annihilation it became exigent to put all of human knowledge on record. The old dream of the universal library is here rekindled (!?) with a new urgency and a new possibility of realization.

The prior determination of language, rooted in the essence of modern technology as enframing, as an instrument of information is the means whereby the world is ordered in advance in the form of information to be processed.

Yet this linguistic determination belongs to a broader epistemic regime. In that regime, the knowledge most worth having is technical knowledge, the knowledge of how things work. To know how things work allows one to anticipate, repeat, vary the process of nature's own working to suit human ends. As bound to such "making," knowledge is power (cf. Descartes & Bacon). Yet the possibility of such knowledge presupposes that nature already be enframed, that is, set up and ordered a priori as a domain of effective objects that is in principle at our complete disposal.

"The computer does not impose upon us the ways in which it should be used." In an obvious, common sense way, this is correct. As the wielders of computer power, the decisions about use and purpose are within our individual and collective control. That does not rule out that on certain criteria bad decisions can still be made and that a certain calculative vigilance over uses is required. But is that the whole story. For one thing, the computer is now so integrated into our collective lives that it seems unlike it could be factored out with potential collapse. Whether a condition of their existence (as some argue), the institutional and corporate investment and reliance on the computer is now too great to dismiss by an easy appeal to our calculative "freedom." Moreover, at a different level, the paradigm of knowledge that makes the computer possible is one with the paradigm in terms of which its uses are judged. The regime of knowledge as paradigmatically technical , where knowledge, power, and calculation sustain the regime in which the good and the just are determined in terms of our rational calculation of self-interest, where inferences from how things truly are to what ought to be done are ruled out as illicit. In the overlap of these regimes, our interests come more and more to be equated simply with the benefits that a technology provides, and a different conception of the order of things, or of what truly one's interest is, gets dismissed out of hand as irrational or is relegated to the realm of private quirks.

"The computer does not impose upon us the ways in which it should be used." But the computer belongs to a destiny that makes it possible. "To describe that destiny is neither to evaluate it nor deny that it can be changed. But it is to recognize it and to recognize that it does impose." It is in that destiny that the essence and meaning of the computer ultimately lies.