It has often been suggested that technology, whatever its benefits, comes at the expense of more isolated and impoverished human lives. This has been a recurrent theme in the philosophy of technology, especially that influenced by Heidegger, where modernity reduces everything – including us – to resources ready for optimisation and control. But the idea will also be familiar to readers of dystopian science fiction, in which technologically sophisticated societies rarely contain any recognisable or meaningful form of human community. More technology, it would seem, leads to more isolation, be it isolation of humans from nature or from each other.

In recent times, however, such ideas have become less prominent. One important reason for this is that some of the most dominant technologies of our time, such as the internet, facilitate a connectivity between people that is unlike anything we have ever known. How can the general tendency of adopting more technology result in greater isolation? One of the main motivations of this book is the intuition that, whilst it is impossible to make such simple pronouncements as ‘more technology means more isolation’, there are some good reasons why the theme of isolation recurs throughout discussions of technology. Although in need of substantial modification, there is much in these older debates about isolation and separation that are still of significance to current (increasingly technology-reliant) societies, despite the fact that we can so easily Skype our family or play music with strangers on other continents over the internet.

To recover more interesting conceptions of isolation and the different senses in which these have featured in older literatures, I argue, requires a return to ontology. To suggest a turn to ontology is not likely to be treated with the kind of immediate disdain it would have provoked even a few years ago. Indeed, it is almost possible to say that first critical realism and then more recently actor network theory and speculative realism, have made ontology, if not fashionable, then certainly ‘acceptable’ in many quarters. However, it is also fair to say that these developments in ontology, for different reasons, have not really made much of a contribution to understanding the nature of technology, even though there seems to be great scope for doing so.