The man who works recognizes his own product in the World that has actually been transformed by his work: He recognizes himself in it, he sees in it his own human reality, in it he discovers and ...reveals to others the objective reality of his humanity, of the originally abstract and purely subjective idea he has of himself. Alexandre Kojève (
1980
, 27)
The essay critiques an aspect of the so-called post-mobile wave of technological change that claims, through the vector of virtual reality (VR), to have created an 'empathy machine' that will form the basis of a new journalism. Through VR devices deployed by news organisations such as the New York Times, and multilateral institutions such as the United Nations, users will be so powerfully immersed in, for example, a street demonstration, or a refugee camp, that the empathy they feel may constitute a new strengthening of the fourth estate's civic role in informing and enlightening the public, to the extent that it can go beyond subjective empathy to develop a shared basis for political participation in civil society. The essay considers these claims from the overarching context of what is called digitality. It argues that human agents are analogue agents from an analogue world. Digitality, by contrast, is an essentially alienating sphere wherein digital media cannot replicate analogue communication processes without generating gaps, voids, and 'missing information'. It further argues, extending insights from Guy Debord, that what VR does produce is a powerful 'integrated spectacle' that is a pale substitute for the form of interactive experience needed for the generation of empathy. Taken together, the essay concludes that empathy, a contestable term in its common understanding to begin with, cannot be generated from a digital source. Moreover, should VR become the next dominant post-mobile technological wave as the tech giants predict, then people, users and consumers of VR products in the fourth estate news context, will be further distanced from the analogue reality of the actual world.
How do technologies shape participation? The rise of digital technologies has facilitated novel modes of engagement, such as political campaigns, protest movements, or civic education initiatives. ...However, changing economies of attention and politics of affect have allowed right-wing populist and far-right actors and movements to also reap benefits. This volume brings together new perspectives from general education and media education on digital democratic publics.
Wie verändern Technologien Partizipation? Das Aufkommen digitaler Technologien hat neue Formen des Engagements ermöglicht, die Protestbewegungen, politische Kampagnen oder auch Initiativen der politischen Bildung prägen. Veränderte Aufmerksamkeitsökonomien und Affektpolitiken, von denen rechtspopulistische Akteur*innen profitieren, fordern die demokratische Selbstverständigung ebenso heraus wie die Macht der Daten. Der Band versammelt Perspektiven aus der Allgemeinen Erziehungswissenschaft und Medienpädagogik auf (post-)digitale demokratische Öffentlichkeiten.
This paper centres the colonial pre-histories of ‘the digital’ to complicate posthumanist theorisations of subjectivity. Posthumanism helpfully undercuts human exceptionalism by presenting ...subjectivity as always-already co-constituted by technology. However, this paper argues that it insufficiently engages the human as the historico-political effect of negating the assumed non-technological colonial Other. Focusing on liberal humanism between the 16th and 19th centuries, the paper theorises the modern human as bound up in ‘technological onticide’. The presumed absence of technology became a (theo-centric, ratio-centric, bio-centric) measure of the Other’s sub-humanity, at the same time as this Other was expected to be humanised through its technologisation. An emphasis on technological onticide complicates universalist theories of subjectivity that take it as always a matter of human-technology co-constitution. The paper argues that, to confront the legacies of ontological murder, conceptual room needs to be made for inhuman, counterhuman or unhuman theories of subjectivity.
Digital platforms research is divided into two streams namely, the architectural/information technology stream, and the management/economics stream. Despite several calls to merge them, research ...efforts remain limited. Examining digital platforms' architecture can provide valuable insights into the management of platform organizations, but management scholars have been inattentive to the "digitality" inherent in platforms, resulting in a research gap. This conceptual work addresses that gap by showing how three types of digital architectures (viz. Ancillary, Additive, and Autonomous) influence four types of value-offerings of a platform (viz. Applications, Physical products, Services, and Content) and their implications for the engagement of users and complementors in the platform's business model. Using sociomateriality theory, it shows how the sociomaterial properties of digital architectures (represented by their “openness” and “generativity”) result in three distinct architectural roles that have significant implications for a platform's management of four different value-offerings. In doing so, it uncovers a significant relationship between digital architectures (i.e., I.T.) and business models (i.e., Management), thereby identifying the connection between the two diverse platform research streams and introducing a framework for management scholars to examine the “digitality” of platforms. More importantly, it reveals the critical role of a platform's digital architecture in determining the products/services, business models and governance mechanisms for a platform business, and develops several propositions for future research.
This article proposes an interpretation of Un mundo huérfano (2016) of Guiseppe Caputo andanalyzes the relations between body, subject, and digital world that the text develops. It focusseson ...cibersexual intercourses, through the prism of posthuman philosophy and the logics of digitalculture which establishes a dynamic of mutual influence with subjectivity, transforming sensitiveperception and human affections in a constant mutation. In this way, the body takes vitalimportance to the question about the becoming of hybrid subjectivities, produced by the newagencies between humans and non-humans in informational capitalism. In the novel, we find therepresentation of a multiple and fragmented body due to the process of digitalization, reflected in the metonymic enunciation and the dehumanization that implies the consumable bodyarrangement. Thus, new aesthetic forms are revealed that seek the semantic and artistic expressionof the effects of digital culture on subjectivity, from the hybrid Latin-American perspective, on themargins of world’s digital technology development centers.
El presente trabajo propone una lectura de la novela Un mundo huérfano (2016) de Guiseppe Caputoy analiza las relaciones cuerpo, sujeto y mundo digital que el texto desarrolla. Se centra en las interacciones cibersexuales, desde el prisma de la filosofía poshumanista y las lógicas de la cultura digital que entra en una dinámica de influencia mutua con la subjetividad, transformando la percepción sensible y los afectos humanos en una mutación constante. Así, el cuerpo adquiere importancia vital ante la pregunta por el devenir de subjetividades híbridas, producidas por nuevos agenciamientos entre humanos y no humanos insertos en el capitalismo informacional. En la novela encontramos la representación de un cuerpo multiplicado y fragmentado en el proceso de digitalización, reflejado en la enunciación metonímica y deshumanizado en su posición de consumible. Surgen, así, nuevas formas estéticas que buscan expresar los efectos de la cultura digital sobre la subjetividad en el plano semiótico y artístico desde el ser latinoamericano como lugar del híbrido, al margen de los centros desarrolladores de la tecnología digital.
This article presents The City as Text’s project – a virtual memory archive from the social uprising in Chile 2019 – that responds to the urgency of preserving the memory engraved on the walls faced ...with the threat of being literally whitewashed. A record over a single day, through the main street in the capital city where demonstrations took place, a few days before the government censored the messages written there. Through a hybrid process: an experiential walk complemented by a virtual work allowed the creation of a new kind of memory archive. An interface that invites people all over the world to revisit memory through the streets of Santiago. At the same time, the work explores topics related to the ephemeral nature of public space; the polyphony of protests; the importance of design/technology allowing interfaces that can help people to experience, understand and study political processes, even if they are miles away. The web platform could not be translated just into data. When those codes – guided by design – invite people to take a virtual walk, the information becomes an experience. In this context, the prevailing need to record, share and make it accessible becomes a question of design. The project also dignifies the role of design by documenting heritage in new formats. The City as Text – as an alternative historical archive – is also an invitation to build a more conscious, connected, inclusive, and respectful future.
This article considers artistic engagements with string figure performance and collection as ‘imaginary’ articulations of digital media. As an object of anthropological inquiry, the string figure ...emerges in 1888 with a short paper by Franz Boas. Encouraged by more mainstream publications by Caroline Furness Jansen (2008) and Kathleen Haddon (1930), over the course of the 20th century the string figure would become a model through which largely western writers and artists have explored both the anxieties and dreams of ideal, embodied and networked communication technologies. The present article explores, specifically, the collecting projects and films of Harry Smith in the 1960s and 1970s; the video-performance piece of 1974, titled String Games: Improvisations for Inter-City Video, by the interdisciplinary artist Vera Frenkel; and the string figure exhibit at David Wilson’s Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City, California. Through a media-archeological lens, the history of string figure fascination takes shape as a repository of dreams about (digital) communication, which, it is additionally suggested in a final section, might yet allow for the expansion and enlargement of conceptions of both digitality and media.
