This is part of Disassemble, a philosophy of tech newsletter.
It seems paradoxical on first blush:
the more we are in a world the harder it is to see ourselves.
In other (more) words:
the more we are present within a particular set of circumstances,
the more we become habituated we to those circumstances, and thus
the less we are aware of all of the subconscious expectations, thoughts and behaviours that constitute our being in those circumstances.
We understand this implicitly.
We get that people who are new to a situation can draw attention to the quirks to which we have all become accustomed; we know the value of a 'set of fresh eyes". But unpacking this idea, and determining its implications has far reaching effects.
In fact, I spoke a bit about this in previous newsletters. I discussed how Heidegger observed how we are 'thrown' into a particular set of circumstances and find ways to ‘cope’ with them. In fact, we're never not in circumstances - we are inextricably linked to our environment (making a subject-object divide unhelpful). This is what makes ‘circumstances’ so challenging to parse and fathom. You can investigate an ever expanding, deepening scope of circumstances for any one person.
But what’s easier to examine is how coping occurs, and how people who create products of all sorts are complicit in this coping.
Coping is something we are rarely conscious of. Most of our mental and physical activity happens 'backstage', hidden from conscious awareness. This adaptation makes it easier for us to focus on areas that require our full, conscious attention.
But in order for our backgrounded physical and mental dispositions to function automatically, or at least smoothly, they have to be formed around expected, sufficiently regular stimuli. Our neuronal structure and musculoskeletal structure has to be well aligned to the particularities in the environment. This alignment is based on evolution and our personal past experiences.
For example:
We implicitly recognise faces in a way that goes far beyond just recognising an individual facial feature - we understand facial feature groupings as a unique emergent property, we even have a special part of our brain devoted to it. We even see faces in things. This is due to the evolutionary utility of identifying faces.
We don't have any just any physical presence. Our bodies, stances and movements are based upon our environment - what we as a species have adapted to, as well as what we as individuals have adapted to. For example, boxers default to particular ways of holding and moving their bodies while considering their next move, bobbing and weaving with their guard up. This is due to the how the environment (e.g., a small ring), equipment (e.g., boxing gloves) and the rules of the sport (engage in physical bouts only involving the fists), afford particular behaviours.
We intuit that a door affords a particular method of interaction. Without us explicitly, consciously detailing the way that we will interact with a door, we know what pulling, pushing, and turning all ‘appear as’. Our bodies take stances and actions in a fluid, backgrounded sense because we our physically habituated to a specific possibility of action afforded by the environment.
In this way, coping with the world and the possibilities of action and interpretation it affords doesn't just define what we can do, but it also literally defines our being. As our world is full of designed things, this means that things we design design us.
For example, we have developed the capacity to determine suitability of a mate in seconds via dating apps. We swipe left, we swipe right - all within seconds - to either ‘match’ with someone or dismiss them. But this ‘swiping’ isn't just ‘swiping’, it's also a rapid heuristic diagnosis.
The rapid heuristic diagnosis is based on the structure of how we are afforded, in this case, potential mates. We are offered thousands of mates - a functionally endless amount - so we have had to develop heuristics to evaluate the peculiarities of the data the app allows users to upload (content in photos, names, interests) to determine the suitability of a match.
And when asked, users may be hard pressed to determine the precise reasons for them dismissing or selecting a prospective match, or they may post-hoc rationalise. This endless queue of people affords quick evaluation - if the app provided fewer potential mates, surely, we would engage in more robust evaluations of potential partners.
Again, this is implicit behaviour, which is brought about through the affordance of a designed application. Affordances here can simply be defined as how the environment relates to a person to enable or disable particular behaviours. Stairs afford stepping, a mouse enables gripping and sliding, and Tinder affords using an app-specific, yet individual, simple set of heuristics to evaluate potential mates.
The worrying thing is that this behaviour is very difficult to parse. Do we understand our implicit behaviour with these designed objects? Do we understand how our designed environment is literally constituting our mental and physical being in this way?
Digital technologies have been hugely problematic in this realm. I previously discussed how digital technologies prioritise doing over thinking, how they reveal the world in a way that encourages the doing of activities (namely spending money) rather than the understanding of systems of being. Understanding, in this sense, is not just about grokking the technological system, or even the world, but also about how you are being constituted by the digital system you are engaged with.
We can see bare-bones attempts at this; trackers that display how long you have been spending on individual apps. Apple’s Screen Time, for instance.
But in general apps and software provide little in terms of capacity for self-reflection. No product has policies you agree to that discuss how your cognitive and physical constitution may change. These discussions, unfortunately, are only left to academics - even designers generally aren’t incentivised to partake!
It’s true that all designed objects would - in effect - comprise our thoughts and behaviours, given the definition I provided. But digital software is especially problematic given its interactivity, its personalisation, its proactivity, its seamlessness, its ubiquity, etc. Certainly how stairs afford our behaviour and thought is almost certainly less drastically deranging than digital systems.
One needn’t look any further than how Facebook, Youtube and Google have been implicated in new ways of understanding the world; their structure affords new ways of transmitting personalised truths, of forming groups, and of evaluating ideas. We cope with these affordances, and so we ourselves are changed.
We may be think we have agency - even an increased agency - with these products, but understanding how that agency is afforded - and the costs therein - is a whole other matter entirely.
Thanks for reading. As always, I’ll expand more on these ideas in future newsletters.
I’ve pulled these ideas from various sources. A lot of what I’ve been discussing has been related to theories that I’ve yet to mention, but one especially pertinent one is known as ecological psychology, especially enactivism. You can read more about it here.
I’ve also pulled a great deal from affordance theory. You can read a lot about it in Jenny L. Davis’ new book How Artifacts Afford.
The initial image is from Michael Frey