On Digital Bildung: Raising a Critical Awareness of Digital Matters

The aim of the article is to theoretically develop a notion of digital Bildung that accepts the “world” of today as characterised by the entanglement of humans and technology. I draw on Adorno’s critical notion of Bildung, Luciano Floridi’s and Katherine Hayles’ respective understandings of the human-technology entanglement, and the social philosophy of the American philosopher Robert Brandom to understand Bildung as a piecemeal process. Nevertheless, Bildung is a rational process of making explicit the implicit connections to which we commit ourselves by being entangled in a tech–non-tech world. The article contributes to delineating a theoretical notion of digital Bildung that accepts and develops Bildung as critically precipitating from within this entanglement—what Brandom terms a semantic self-consciousness.