• Technics Lifeless and Technics Alive: Activity Without and With Content

    Author(s):
    Andrew Murphie (see profile)
    Date:
    2021
    Group(s):
    Communication Studies
    Item Type:
    Book chapter
    Tag(s):
    Pavlov, media and culture, technology change, technics, philosophy of technology, user behaviour, user experience design, Interface design, interface
    Permanent URL:
    https://doi.org/10.17613/734g-x552
    Abstract:
    How did so much of contemporary technics become so disappointing, so deadening? How is technics being thought, and worked with, to enliven? What different assemblages and principles are involved? This chapter begins in sympathy with Michel Serres’ “aggrieved shame” and then moves to Wendy Hui Kyong Chun's discussion of an "undeadness" at the heart of technical culture. After summarising more positive pathways in interaction design and thinking, I argue that a series of Pavlovist variations on powerlessness still inhabits contemporary technics. This combines with a series of calculative assemblages to form a calculative-behavioural assemblage, both in technics generally, and in what have become "cognition" and computing in recent culture. These assemblages in fact have three aspects: actual, directly material assemblages of technologies and processes; abstract "agencements", for example, a generalised Pavlovism that infuses subsequent events; and diagrams, meant to intervene in both. I then suggest principles of escape towards other kinds of relations between technics and worlds. These relations affirm mutual care as well as mutual powers. They would be immanently attentive to the complexity and variability of the world as event.
    Metadata:
    Published as:
    Book chapter    
    Status:
    Published
    Last Updated:
    7 months ago
    License:
    Attribution
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