Affordances for thinking about technology: Hivemind Jam
I've been thinking about thinking about technology since at least 1993, when Virtual Communities was published, and faced criticism by scholars as being "technoutopian" despite "Disinformocracy," the concluding chapter, on what I thought could go wrong with social media's ancestor -- "computer-mediated communication." My 3 years editing Whole Earth Review encouraged me to question my assumptions -- my enthusiasm for digital media foremost among them. I did some reading and thinking and arguing, and in 1998 wrote Technology 101: What Do We Need To Know About The Future We're Creating? (Forgive circa 1998 html formatting in previous link. I changed the name to "What Technophiles Need to Know" if you want to read the Medium version.) I have a collection of my writing about technology over the past few decades on my website, and I've written a number of posts here about technology criticism. In 2001, the final chapter of Smart Mobs was titled "Always-on Panopticon...or Cooperation Amplifier."
All of which is context to more recent online collective thinking aloud about conceptual tools for thinking about technology that I instigated recently.
I started playing with the hashtag #technology on Mastodon, an open-source, decentralized, "federated" online platform that is and is not like Twitter. I've had an account for four years, but only became active again around a week ago, when it looked like Twitter was in danger of collapse or pollution by hate speech and disinfotainment. I won't get into the discourse about Elon Musk, but will say only that this is not the first time that a person who achieved great success in other digital technologies failed utterly when faced with the collision between digital technologies and human behavior. I'm looking at you, Google. Remember Google+, Orkut, or Wave? -- social media platforms that supported communities that were swept away or fled elsewhere when Google killed the platform.
During the first days of turmoil when it became clear that Musk either doesn't know what he is doing or deliberately set out to destroy the online ecosystem of communities that evolved in Twitter, I saw a link to a paper on Social Resilience in Online Communities:
We empirically analyze five online communities: Friendster, Livejournal, Facebook, Orkut, Myspace, to identify causes for the decline of social networks. We define social resilience as the ability of a community to withstand changes. We do not argue about the cause of such changes, but concentrate on their impact. Changes may cause users to leave, which may trigger further leaves of others who lost connection to their friends. This may lead to cascades of users leaving.
Twitter looks in danger of cascades of users leaving right now. More interesting is the emerging population who are going to stick around Twitter, but are using Mastodon in parallel. I'm not leaving Twitter unless it becomes unbearable/unuseful, but I'm enjoying my first days on Mastodon (I'm @hrheingold@mastodon.social) -- it has similar energy to the early days of the WELL and Twitter. That isn't to say the explosive growth of Mastodon in recent days is unproblematic. Although Mastodon has evolved its own communities, with their own norms and rituals, for years, the influx of Twitter refugees is swelling the population and exerting strain on both the physical servers and the existing culture. Something similar (but a great deal more clueless) happened in September, 1993, when a wave of newbies swamped the ability of Usenet newsgroup communities to pass along the norms that had grown from years of use, discussion, and conflict -- Eternal September, as it is called.
I started posting to the Mastodon hashtag #technology to see who (and what ideas and links) I could surface. I wanted to make it clear that I am both an enthusiast and someone who is trying to think critically about technology.
This is what I wrote in a Mastodon thread (I found out by asking that the way to do this according to the norms of my server is to indicate in the root post that it is the beginning of a thread, and make that post globally readable; next, I created the thread in a series of replies that are set to "unlisted.") People who want to follow the thread can do so without crowding the timeline with the entire thread. I am finding out that it is also both a norm and part of the user interface to hide media posts, political posts, potentially triggering content behind a "content warning." (I also learned that early Mastodon culture was created by LGBGT people as a refuge, and that unlike Twitter, US culture and politics had not been dominant. Another early criticism is that Mastodon is a white space. We'll see what happens with those potential sites of conflict over the next few months as thousands join the greater Mastodon fediverse every day.
With my enthusiast hat on, I want to note that the always-on, world-wide, personal thinktank aspect of online discourse has always fascinated and benefited me. I also believe that my participation has benefitted others. I've been a writer and a teacher; of course I want to introduce my ideas to others, whether or not I benefit financially. And the large amount of material I've contributed to the online commons has not been without financial benefit. The miracle of online thinking aloud, as I've experienced it, is that my contributions have been reciprocated manyfold. When writing books, I often put out what I've found out or figured out for anyone to use -- and incorporated valuable online feedback in the finished product. By thinking aloud in the presence of people who pay attention to me online, I both educate and learn; when others join me, we can sharpen each others' arguments, fill in holes in each others' knowledge.
Here is what I posted:
Off the top of my head, four different concepts/metaphors have proved to be useful.
Lewis Mumford's "megamachine" -- the notion that the ur-tool that drove the evolution of technology was a social machine -- the way rulers and their musclemen allied with priests to build pyramids and irrigation projects by treating people as components in a hierarchical machine with a grand plan and overseers at every level.
Uncut Heidegger is mostly impenetrable to me (here is something decent about how to understand him on technology), but I latched onto his notion of a "standing reserve." Humans make use of the world, we turn stones into axes, and have come to see the world as a "standing reserve" for our exploitation. (Francis Bacon emphasized that humans stand apart and above nature and are entitled use it to uncover knowledge that could be useful to us; In the Novum Organon, Bacon writes: "Let the human race recover that right over nature which belongs to it by divine bequest.".
Jacques Ellul wrote presciently and somewhat depressingly about the future of technology back in the 1950s. In English, his masterwork is "The Technological Society." In the original French, it's "La Technique." Technique, or any method for achieving ends with increasing efficiency, is the foundation -- like standing reserve, it's a way of seeing the world. Technology grows from it. And it colonizes every aspect of human life. (A good short, not easy to think about explanation of Technique here.)
Finally (PDF), Langdon Winner taught me about "regimes." The greater part of technology is not visible. An automobile is the result of a complex global supply chain, from mines to microchips, and its use of petroleum is changing the climate.
So...what other concepts/metaphors have proved to be useful to you for thinking about #technology?
I started getting replies very quickly from people on Mastodon that I had not previously known (the hashtag is like an antenna that broadcasts to everyone else interested in a topic). If the attribution is of the form @hrheingold, that refers to Twitter handle; if attribution is of the form @hrheingold@mastodon.social it refers to a Mastodon handle.
Marco Neumann @neumarcx@mastodon.sdf.org replied to my call for useful concepts for thinking about technology:"The Promethean Gap: I'm a hopeless technology optimist myself but I can see how humans can get mentally / emotionally overwhelmed by the technology they have created. It's this gap and sense of inferiority that leads to shame," directing me to writing by Marc Barham @magwitch5151:
The Promethean Gap’ is a term borrowed from Günther Anders (1902–1992) who was an Austrian philosopher, critical theorist, political activist, and a writer of poems, short stories, and novels. His works on the critical theory of technology have remained rather undiscovered. In distinction to the Frankfurt School critical theorists, Anders explicitly called himself a critical theorist of technology.
The Promethean Gap is an updated reading of the ancient Greek myth. According to the myth, Prometheus stole fire from the gods at Mount Olympus and gave it to humanity. In Western thinking, Prometheus has come to represent the ideal of confident humanity becoming autonomous through self-enlightenment and the domination of nature. The domestication of fire, synonymous with the birth of technology, developed to become a means of defying, virtually inverting nature and of defying the prescriptions of the pagan Greek gods.
According to Anders, humanity’s domination of nature through technology would eventually turn against itself. Not because technology fails, but because it becomes prolific beyond measure. The products exceed their producers. It entails gaps between the relations of production and ideology, production and imagination, doing and feeling, knowledge and conscience, the machine and the body, production, and needs. This existential discrepancy is what he called “The Promethean Gap.”
@Suzyanalyst1@mastodon.social replied:
Cognitive maps. I think Frederick Jameson might be who I picked up the term from, though I see it is also used more widely: “The notion of a "cognitive map" enables "a representation by the individual of the vast unrepresentable totality which is the ensemble of society's structures as a whole"—ie it lets you link stuff together that connects together but is not necessarily all in view.
Adam Greenfield @urbnscl treated me to a reminder, refresher and extender of what little I had know about Bruno Latour
Latour comes in for a lot of grief from my friends, more or less fairly, because he lacks an account of power, but I’ve found his notions of “recruitment” and “translation” also very helpful. Every pristine idea of a novel technology has to undergo many developmental stages to make its way from thought to entity in the world. At each of those stages, it will need to *recruit* new enabling actors – even the first napkin sketch is such a recruitment. And every act of recruitment involves a *translation* of the idea that makes it make sense to the actor being recruited. The idea takes one step closer to actualization, but it also evolves by drift – subtly or otherwise. As a complex technology develops further, its design envelope is massively constrained by the need to recruit fairly autonomous actors – gauge conventions, regulatory agencies, standards bodies, industry interoperability consortia, etc.
So the art of shepherding a technology into existence more or less as originally envisioned is therefore largely one of negotiating recruitments that only impose a minimum of requirements for translation. That’s what I’ve always understood Latour to be proposing in “Aramis,” though it’s considerably more nuanced than that, and I’ve found it an incredibly useful way of looking at things – at least before I concluded that design had been eaten whole by capitalism, & left the field.
William L. Anderson of Austin, Texas, https://about.me/wlanderson reminded me:
Langdon Winner's Autonomous Technology (1977), pp. 11-12: distinguished apparatus (tools, instruments, machines, appliances, weapons, gadgets), technique (the whole of technical activities -- skills, methods, procedures, routines -- that people engage in to accomplish tasks), and organization (all varieties of technical (rational-productive) social arrangements, including varieties of social organization -- factories, workshops, bureaucracies, armies, research and development teams, and the like)
Stephanie Lepp @stephlepp (one of my most brilliant students when I taught at UC Berkeley over a decade ago), reminded me of affordances and technological and social determinism.
An affordance is both an artifact (or part of an artifact) and a relationship between a technology and a human user. The function of a carburetor is to provide a combustible fuel mixture to the spark plug -- no need for human participation. What is the function of a steering wheel, then? It's an affordance that connects human activity to the functioning of the automobile. A doorknob is an affordance for humans to open and close doors. A hypertext link is an affordance for a human to access media by clicking.
Technological determinism is a bias built into the way most people talk about technology: Social media does not cause cooperation or conflict; the way people use social media to communicate is the cause cooperation or conflict. Media and other tools can afford certain kinds of behavior, but they don't cause them. This might seem like semantic trivia, but the language we use biases our concepts and affects our actions: When I was teaching, I tried to be careful about highlighting the human agency that is part of the causation of a technological effect.
There is more, and I could stir it up further -- and will -- by offering this back to the online hivemind. If you are interested in a ground-level briefing in technology criticism and philosophy of technology, you could do worse than reading all the links in this essay.