Arrogance, Agency, & Audacity
This discussion is centered on an explication of Bay & Rickert’s reading; I attempt to address how locating agency within objects and environments affects the privileging of human perspectives. I mainly suggest that the definition and deployment of human “design” of any particular object or technology suggests an embedded arrogance that purports to be able to fully map relational contexts, despite Kevin Kelly’s assertion that we are never fully able to anticipate “second-order effects.” I do my best to keep up with Heideggerian philosophy, asking questions about how we might partially map affordances with game theory, and how this conception of agency relates to animals and robots. Yes, robots.
Attribution: "Moonlight Sonata of Love" by Syenta
Moonlight Sonata of Love by Syenta is licensed under a Attribution (3.0).
Comments
Agency and Will
Thanks for your podcast. Thought-provoking and well presented. Good questions at the end that I'd like to take more time to think about, especially in relation to what appears to be growing eco-criticism.
In this comment, however, I want to continue the conversation on humanism and tie in aspects of the Bay and Rickert article to agency and mastery. What’s interested me this week and in our conversation in class last week (which focused in part on the practical use and evaluation of assemblage in the classroom) is the desire to make sense of these technologies and their relationship to our lives. Admittedly, if we didn’t try to do this, we wouldn’t be good students or academics but the repetition of non-mastery is become more and more significant to me. Because even as we are able to critique, as you do, the limitations of the humanistic perspective, we still must convince ourselves time and time again that this is indeed limited. The language we’ve been using to discuss this has been in terms of agency, in the way that Bay and Rickert consider the rhetorical agency of objects. Tied to agency, however is a sense of will and I think implicit in these conversations is the sense that if an object or person is granted some sort of agency, it also has a will to direct that agency in predetermined and understandable ways. What Bay and Rickert and the emphasis on interface this week bring in is the sense that interfaces don’t have wills, that what we receive as meaning or direction from these objects merely is. It is not intention. In this way we can understand better what Bay and Rickert (with Heidegger’s help) mean by “dwelling” and “attuning” ourselves. What this implies however is that there is a way to ultimately attune ourselves to these technological objects and that mastery might exist on a horizon. What would attunement without mastery look like? Is this Bay and Rickert’s point? I hope my comment builds on this thoughtful podcast and spurs new thoughts on what is only the beginning of an interesting conversation.
I agree with you: Facebook,
I agree with you: Facebook, Sims, and other online technologies are indeed fragmenting ourselves. But, the question should be, when does technology, or anything exterior to ourselves, not fragment us? I would argue never; technology is always re-constructing our identities. So, to add go with your point, are virtual communities fragmenting our communities? Of course! They are not only fragmenting them, but they’re re-defining what a community is; thus, no longer can we think of a community as simply two people speaking face to face, but we have to expand our notion of community altogether. Can we, as you ask, see this as reality? Well, first, I would argue that the word “reality” isn’t so cut and dry: If these technologies generate how we perceive our world, then I think that we have to see that Facebook et all are part of our reality. Yet, this is all depending upon how you define reality. Blake and Locke have drastically different views – I tend to be more Blakean.
But I think the question that you are really after is: is this good or bad? Well, that is a big question, one that I don’t think there is an answer to. I think that, on the one hand, you are right to suggest that online technologies have strayed us – in some sense – from face to face communication. However, on the other hand, online technologies have opened us to a myriad of different experiences, many of which have benefited humanity, that would not have been otherwise possible. (Look at how Match.com has changed the dating world.)
From the articles that we have read, I have agreed with some, and disagreed with others; I think that with some ideas you can make an argument as to why they are benefiting humanity, and others that may not be the best idea. But, of course, my greatest argument has come not from the technologies themselves, but from how individuals have utilized those technologies.
I think that you are right to ask some of these questions; however, I think that it would perhaps be more beneficial to start to examine how technologies interact with our everyday lives, and, by extension, see them as part of our everyday lives and ourselves. Whether it is good or bad, I think, shouldn’t be the real question: the question ought to be: how it affects us, what is it doing, and where is it going.
Interfaces *as* Interfaces
Steve, I concur, I think we should be less interested in Lanham's weak defense in terms of whether (a) specific technology is bad or good, but instead consider the Q Question's strong defense, regarding how technologies (rhetorically) construct and constitute our everyday lives. This is why I was drawn to Bay & Rickert's discussion of Heidegger and new media in the first place, as their deployment of Heideggerian concepts attempts to delineate some of the ways in which people, environments, and technologies are co-adaptive, defined by various affordances. In one sense, technologies can be seen as interfaces (which could be bad or good), but in another sense technologies exist in the world and can be seen as assemblages. As you point out, these are relational and are always already enmeshed in reality in ways that supercede our ability to anticipate them. I tried to tie in Turkle and Longo here, as I am interested in how object design is foundationally suggestive of human agency, despite Heidegger's (and Haraway's) suggestion that our partial perspectives delimit any such agency. The readings this week touched on objects as objects and objects as designed artifacts, such as those found in mobile phones (Fortunati), bridges (Bay & Rickert), Facebook (Bay & Rickert), or any of the objects described by Turkle. These can all be seen as interfaces between various relations; in the case of Facebook or other online networks, the relations are between people and people, or people and technology. These relations might be said to be good or bad, but such a question wouldn't address the issue of how such an interface (or system of interfaces) redefines relationships in general, constituting new methods of communication or relations. This type of affordance allows for new schemas and uses, while the embedded context of this interface (within larger networks and systems) conceals & reveals further relations, which I relate to Kelly's second order effects. I wanted to focus on how such complexity (as found in Hawke) is irreducible to phenomenology or conceptual logics, or at least to think of them as such would be arrogant, revealing an underlying humanistic perspective. Instead, I thought the readings this week attempted to show how we unfairly privilege such perspectives, without giving due credence to the agency objects and interfaces gather on their own. Considering such extrinsic elements adds considerably to the complexity of our situated contexts, and points - in my opinion - to Lanham's strong defense after all.
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