Common sense and technics: towards a technical literacy

Abstract

The determination of what might mean common sense was a task that Western Thought set for it since its inception in Ancient Greece. However, the specific and systematic treatment emerged strongly in the XVII century and was consolidated in the XVIII. From the plurality of meanings that we can find for this term, we can determine one that holds in all the attempts that history has presented to itself. Common sense emerges as problem solver, but also as an obstacle that needs to be superseded in order to think something anew. It is from the relations media realize that we can find today a hypostatization of the common sense, although there is no precise thematization in this particular problem. In this essay, we try to show how historically the problem moves to other nomenclatures, and causes disturbance in the understanding of the phenomena that media creates, but that has behind it a common ground: a certain literacy that constitutes use of any technique.