Contemporary man and technology: from meaninglessness to encountering oneself

Abstract

The human experience is a complex tapestry that oscillates amid a great paradox: only when everything seems to lose meaning does the need to find it emerge. With the rise of new technologies, humankind brings to light countless possibilities for being in the world, which in turn represent a plexus of opportunities that lead to an ontological-existential shift: from meaninglessness to finding oneself. This article explores the concept of "finding oneself" as a process that reveals the meaninglessness in which technified humankind resides and the states through which they transit to encounter their being. This discussion raises the question of how the instrumentalization of technology instrumentalizes oneself, and how this leads humankind into a state of meaninglessness. However, a double ontological shift is posed in which meaninglessness is precisely the state in which humanity questions its being. Thus, this condition, although it may seem hidden, also uncovers and reveals the path to finding oneself. So it is worth asking: How can new technologies threaten the loss of human meaning? What makes what is revealed about human beings in technological networks interpretable as meaningless, and how is this revealed precisely what is entailed by encountering oneself?