Interactionism in the age of ubiquitous telecommunication

Acta Poética

Sobre el papel mediador de las nuevas tecnologías en la sociedad de la información en cuanto espectro de zonas significantes que transgreden muchos dominios tradicionales. Para acercarnos a las condiciones y contextos de la implementación, producción y usos de la tecnología de información y comunicación, se observa el juego recíproco entre las transformaciones tecnológicas y culturales. Examinaré un segmento de la trayectoria de los cambios transformativos cuya implícita o explícita “interactividad” recibió como parte del imaginario tecnológico de la sociedad de la información. Mediante la crítica cultural que contextualiza las prácticas sincrónicas específicas dentro de los discursos sociales de los escenarios del futuro cuasipolítica y políticamente orientados de la Unión Europea, seguiré el itinerario de lo interactivo en relación a la construcción social del usuario, y mostraré que mientras la visión de la sociedad de la información de hoy puede tomarse como limitada y camino ha...

Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century

My concern with historical transformations in the conception of self has its own history. Its earliest traces can be found in my 1973 essay, " Social psychology as history , " where I proposed that as scientii c accounts of the person enter society, so can they alter the commonly shared visions of self. Authoritative accounts of brain determination of human action, for example, can shit the way in which we understand ourselves and our behavior. h e sense of self, in this case, becomes no more than an artifact of brain stimulation. And with shit s in understanding, so are the cultural mores set in motion and institutional policies transformed. Such concerns gained momentum in the later development of social constructionist theory (Gergen, 1994), and its focus on the historical and cultural lodgement of self-understanding (see, e.g., Graumann & Gergen, 1996). Most central to the present essay, however, was my 1992 book, h e Saturated Self. h is work was centrally concerned with the twentieth century emergence of communication technology and its potentials for transforming the common conception of self. My particular focus in this work was on the Western tradition of individualism in which the origins of action are traced to psychological processes within the person. For much of Western culture, the concept of the individual self-the conscious and cognizant agent of action-is more or less accepted as a natural fact. In courts of law we hold individuals responsible for their actions; in educational settings, we hold individuals responsible for their work; in therapy we treat individual suf ering; and in our democracy each individual is endowed with the right to a vote. Yet, this concept of the individual agent is also peculiarly Western and largely a by-product of cultural developments emerging in the seventeenth and culminating in the twentieth century (see, e.g., Seigel, 2005 ; Taylor, 1992). It is a view to which philosophers such as Descartes, Locke, and Kant

International Journal of Actor-Network Theory and Technological Innovation, 2011

Both actor-network theory and activity theory call attention to the coexistence of people and technology. Although both theories provide analytical tools to understand the nature of the reciprocal action-shaping of humans and nonhumans, each puts emphasis on different conceptual elements of human activity. In this paper, the authors examine both activity theory and actor-network theory and present their similarities and differences, limitations, and complementarities. Using the theoretical lenses of both theories, the authors trace the evolution of an ordinary artifact to illustrate how researchers on the sociology of technology and innovations can benefit from these parallel theoretical approaches.

2020

This thesis works to develop a heuristic technique – the Imbrication Model – for understanding technologies relations to other objects. These relations include objects which contribute to the actualization of a technology and objects which are influenced by the technology. The model draws upon four fields of existing scholarship: Graham Harman’s object- oriented ontology (OOO); Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory (ANT), social construction of technology (SCOT), and media ecology. The Imbrication Model is developed by proposing a novel re-reading of the implications of SCOT and media ecology through the philosophies of objects and non-human actors in OOO and ANT. Particularly, this occurs by stating that technologies relate to objects in one of four ways: if an object relates to a technology, it must be either a performative motive, an ostensive motive, a performative consequence, or an ostensive consequence. These four concepts make up the four quadrants of the Imbrication Model. The model is demonstrated by applying it to the object of the QWERTY keyboard. Finally, the temporal implications of motive and consequence are considered in relation to technological changes over time. This principle is explored via the Imbrication Model through tessellations, where the four quadrants of one technology are diagrammatically compared to the four quadrants of another technology. Ultimately, the unique emphasis of objects as the centerpiece of this thesis enables it to provoke non-obvious questions and facilitate thought along lines which are helpful in emphasizing the importance of indirect relations in media studies.

Information and Organization, 2013

The claims for sociomateriality are reviewed and two key problems are isolated: a failure to be specific about technology and a neglect of broader social structures. These problems are located in the formulations of Barad. Her notion of agential realism is contrasted to an alternative perspective constructed using the resources of critical realism. The potential of the latter to contribute to the refreshing of the socio-technical tradition is outlined. This tradition offers more resources for the consideration of the important role of the material in contemporary organizing than sociomateriality, which is argued to be a wrong turning.

2013 International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS): Reshaping society through information systems design, Milan, Italy.

This article explores how humans come into being with a technological world, that is, a world where information technologies are present in every aspect of human activities becoming internal to what it means to be human. Its empirical focus is on technological scenarios since they uniquely assemble both humans and non-humans into a coherent narrative prescribing what can be legitimately said and done within everyday practices. Their normative character allows a critical reworking of sociomateriality which brings to the fore how both norms and technological objects enable and constrain meaning within everyday practices. The idea of constitutive entanglement, central to sociomateriality, is articulated in more detail while its political repercussions are brought to the fore and examined in detail. As such, sociomaterial accounts acquire more depth as they can challenge the inherited languages of description of technological phenomena, show their historical character and experiment with the possibility of transcending them.

2003

2015

This article takes off from what Lyotard calls ‘the immaterial’, demonstrated in the exhibition Les Immatériaux that he curated at the Centre Pompidou in 1985. It aims at outlining a concept of ‘relational materiality’. According to Lyotard, ‘the immaterial’ is not contrary to material: instead, it is a new industrial material brought about by telecommunication technologies, exemplified by Minitel computers, and serves as basis to describe the postmodern condition. Today this materiality is often referred to as ‘the digital’. In order to enter into a dialogue with Lytoard, and to render his notion of ‘immaterial materials’ contemporary, this article contrasts the concept of relational materiality with some current discourses on digital physics (Edward Fredkin, Gregory Chaitin) and digital textuality (Matthew Kirschenbaum). Against the conventional conception that relations are immaterial (neither being a res nor even having a real esse), and also contrary to a substantialist analysis of materiality, this article suggests that a relational materiality is made visible and explicit under digital conditions. It suggests a reconsideration of the ‘relational turn’ in the early 20th century and the concept of concretisation proposed by Gilbert Simondon. The article concludes by returning to Lyotard’s notion of materialism and his vision of a new metaphysics coming out of this ‘immaterial material’, and offers ‘relational materialism’ as a contemporary response.

The Sociological Review, 2011

An important philosopher and anthropologist of science, Bruno Latour has recently outlined an ambitious programme for a new sociological empiricism, in continuation of his actor-network-theory (ANT). Interrogating issues of description, explanation and theoretical interpretation in this 'sociology of associations', we argue that certain internal tensions are manifest. While Latour's philosophy of social science demands an absolute abandonment of theory in all its forms, proposing instead to simply 'go on describing', he is in practice employing versions of common sense explanation and pragmatic-constructivist theory to make ends meet. The core of this tension, we claim, can be located in Latour's meta-theoretical commitments, in effect obscuring important ways in which human subjects employ things, effects and symbols beyond their simple, 'empirical' existence. To illustrate these claims, we deploy the example of how morality works in social life, and coin the term quasiactant, in allusion to the Latourian actant, to better understand such processes. Our overall criticism of ANT is immanent, aiming at the re-introduction of what we dub 'virtual theory' into Latourian empiricism, thus further strengthening what remains one of the most promising contemporary attempts to reinvigorate the sociological enterprise.