Society & Culture
The purpose of many computer products in the area of information and communications technology is to capture the user’s attention, distract it from the actual place where the user is situated, and export it to some virtual space where advertisers practise their persuasion. The enterprise has been enormously successful, though the effects on users aren’t always benign (anxiety, depression, etc). Philosophically, the more insidious effects are on how we think and who we think we are, encouraging calculative thinking and a post-Cartesian self-image of ourselves as disembodied minds only contingently situated in physical places. The implications for education deserve careful consideration.