Postphenomenology II: practical applications
Chair(s): Kirk M. Besmer (Gonzaga University, United States of America)
Postphenomenology is a methodological approach that seeks to understan human-technology relations by analysing the multiple ways in which technologies mediate human experiences and practices. One of the key accomplishments of postphenomenology is the development of a conceptual repertoire and vocabulary for analysing technologies in use, by focusing on how they become part of human embodiment, give rise to particular forms of sedimentation and resulting habits and practices, and more generally lead users to perceive and experience the world in particular ways. Given its conceptual resources, postphenomenology is often used to provide rich descriptions of actual technologies as they are taken up in human practices.
The rationale behind this panel is that because postphenomenology is a philosophy from technologies, it needs to continuously let its vocabulary be challenged by technological developments. That is, not only does postphenomenology offer a new perspective on technologies, these technologies, in turn, also offer a new perspective on postphenomenology. This dialectical process is reflected in the four papers in this symposium, each of which take a postphenomenological approach to a specific type of technology.
The first paper argues that contrary to Critical Algorithm Studies, which characterizes the black box nature of algorithms as an epistemological problem solved by transparency, a postphenmenological approach frames algorithmic opacity as a hermeneutic issue, thereby allowing for a reconceptualization of algorithmic power and resistance. Taking the meme as a use case, the second paper focuses on the postphenomenological concepts of multistability and variational theory to consider ideas like contextual meaning, participatory co-shaping, technological layering, nuanced emotional expression, and virality. The third paper focuses on good health care practices. There is no denying that health care is technologically mediated, and insofar as one makes oneself vulnerable when seeking health care, trust is a key constituent in health care. The third paper takes a postphenomenological approach to describe how technologies establish, challenge, and reinforce trust in healthcare. Harking back to themes in Husserl, the fourth paper takes a postphenomenological approach to current global crises, such as pandemics, famines, war, etc., arguing that crises create their own technologies, dubbed, “technologies of crisis.”
Presentations of the Symposium
Appropriating hidden technologies: a postphenomenological response to critical algorithm studies
Olya Kudina1, Anthony Longo2
1TU Delft, 2University of Antwerp
This paper examines the political implications of algorithmic opacity through the lens of postphenomenology in discussion with dominant critiques within Critical Algorithm Studies (CAS). Many CAS scholars have argued that the hidden, ‘black box’ character of algorithms undermines the possibility of political action and resistance, framing algorithms as epistemological problems to be solved with transparency. This critique aligns with a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ (Ricoeur 1970), largely focused on the uncovering of concealed power structures. Such critiques presuppose that the physical or spatio-phenomenal presence, or ‘visibility’, of technologies is a necessary condition for their political appropriation. The corresponding methodological assumption is that because algorithms are ‘invisible’, empirically-oriented methods are at best unhelpful and at worst damaging to understand how algorithms affect our online interactions. Therefore, scholars have widely rejected or questioned (post)phenomenology as a method to study algorithms. In response, we argue that postphenomenology offers an alternative theoretical framework by rethinking the conditions of appropriation. Drawing on its insights, we show that the absence of material presence does not preclude political engagement. Instead, as technological appropriation is always already preceded by acts of interpretation, we find that users imaginatively construct algorithms as objects with particular qualities. This hermeneutic process decouples appropriation from materiality, positioning algorithms as hermeneutic rather than purely epistemological problems. Building on this framework, we explore three modes of ‘algorithmic resistance’ (mastering, confusing, and manipulating algorithms) each demonstrating users’ creative engagements with algorithmic systems. These practices highlight the interpretive dimensions of resistance, which macro-oriented Marxist approaches prevailing in CAS often overlook. By integrating postphenomenological insights, we argue for a reconceptualization of algorithmic power and resistance, proposing that acts of subjectivation and desubjectivation emerge through a hermeneutic ‘lemniscate’ that mediates reflective and pre-reflective relations to technology. This contribution not only seeks to enrich debates on political agency in algorithmic environments by foregrounding the interpretive practices that underlie resistance, but defend a micro-level postphenomenological approach against critiques that it lacks political relevance.
Intimate technology: the postphenomenological meme use case
Stacey Irwin
Millersville University
Social media is a kind of digital media, which is a technology bundle that combines technological devices and information that is created, viewed, and/or shared digitally. Information that is contained in digital media includes text, audio, video, and images. This presentation explores the Use Case of that which can be imitated, the meme. Social media is the most popular way to push a meme. While some researchers have shared that social media is not in itself “social” (Majkut 2010; Turkle 2012), others look at current experiences and feel that indeed, social media and the technologies embedded within it, are social and even intimate (Carr 2015; Manovich, 2001). That is the nature of participatory media (Jenkins, 2018; 2016). Participation means that anyone and everyone connected to an available system has the ability to post, push, stream, and create content to multiple audiences any time of day or night. This daily participation, a habit for some, is facilitated by technology’s mediated and enfolded elements that provide “technologically texture” in the everyday lifeworld (Ihde 1990, 1). The main movement that provides a social experience is the ability to participate in the process of making and sharing and even remaking and resharing. This is the crux of meme creation and use predicated on technologies like the internet, devices, digitally available materials, software and apps, shared on a very wide scale or to a single individual. Sometimes this process cements culture and other times it breaks it (Irwin, 2021). Philosophy of Technology thinkers help to analyze the participatory spaces of social media, facilitated by technologies that seemingly provide private and intimate spaces. This postphenomenological Use case focuses on multistability and variational theory, to consider ideas like contextual meaning, participatory co-shaping, technological layering, nuanced emotional expression and virality (Fried 2021; Hasse 2008; Ihde 1993).
Postphenomenology and technologies in times of multiple crises
Markus Bohlmann
University of Muenster
Our present is characterized by the experience of multiple crises that overlap in many ways, e.g., pandemics, famines, ecological crises, migration, war, demographic change, or crises of democracy. In addition to regulatory political solutions, such crises always offer technological solutions both large and small. Crisis has been a classic subject of phenomenology since Husserl's Vienna Lecture of 1935. At that time, Husserl already understood crisis as a disease-like state of society. For him, the European crisis at the time was primarily characterized by a lack of cultural progress. He distinguished “to live” as “creating culture within historical continuity” from medically defined life (Husserl. 1965. Phenomenology and the crisis of philosophy. Transl. Lauer. New York: Harper & Row. P. 150). In today's crises, it is no longer possible to make such a clear distinction between culture, lived life and medically defined life. Technologies of crisis are important cultural products that still show “historical continuity” even after the crisis has been overcome. Technologies are an important part of crisis itself.
Technologies of crises have not yet been examined in a comprehensive manner from a postphenomenological perspective. In postphenomenology, there are analyses of technologies whose distance from humans has led to technological breakdowns and even crises. In Technology and the Lifeworld, for example, Don Ihde interpreted the reactor accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in 1979 as problematic because “the nuclear power system was observed only through instrumentation” (Ihde. 1990. Technology and the Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. P. 85). This is a case of technologies as the cause of crisis, most recently experienced in the Fukushima nuclear crisis 2011. Current crises, on the other hand, create their own technologies, they have a meaning for humans in crisis, they are close to the body (proximal) and play a decisive role in how crisis is given to us. They are technologies of crisis.
In this presentation, I will use examples of educational technologies of crisis to illustrate some important theoretical aspects of technologies of crisis, for example:
1. Technologies of crisis are proximal.
2. Crisis is about life itself, but not as “mere life,” but as “creature” (Agamben and back to Benjamin).
3. Sovereignty in crisis, especially technological sovereignty, is the exercise of biopower (Foucault). In a crisis, there are regulatory sovereign actions and technological ones.
4. In crisis, technological action replaces interpersonal action.
5. Primary stabilities of technologies of crisis cannot be evaluated ethically. It is always about the whole of life here.
6. Secondary stabilities of technologies of crisis focus the field of awareness on the crisis itself.
7. Multiple crises trigger a struggle for attention, which becomes a struggle for the sedimentation of technologies.
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