You’re reading DisAssemble, a biweekly philosophy of tech newsletter aimed at those interested in creating better digital products.
I recently lapsed in keeping DisAssemble updated (I aim to make it biweekly) because I moved house, and an interview I am conducting for the newsletter is taking longer than usual (but it'll be great when it comes).
But! There has recently been an influx of new subscribers, and given my slight hiatus I thought it’d be an excellent time to reflect. You see, I’ve actually been attempting to write a story of sorts through this newsletter. It's a story about our relationship with digital technology. But unlike other newsletters, it aims to use philosophical concepts as leverage to help us create technologies in ways that engender a better world.
There's essentially 5 dimensions to this story thus far:
The ontological
The epistemological
The practical
The internal-external
The meaningful
Each one of these dimensions discusses how we are in the world - and they each lead into one another. Note that each one isn’t about how we do something or how technology does something, but how the full and necessary situatedness of us within the world enacts something.
The ontological dimension - How to thing
Initially, I wrote about how we, as humans, are 'thrown' into the world and are forced to ‘cope’ with what's available. These are the philosopher Martin Heidegger’s terms. His concepts helps us consider the ontology of technology - how technology shapes what ‘things’ there are in the world.
His term 'dasein' is especially useful here. It helps us move linguistically beyond the subject/object binary (i.e. that there is the rational human subject who interacts with a neutral and separate object in the world). It does not see ‘being’ as prior to ‘being-in-the-world’ - we are inseparable from our environment. There isn’t any isolating the mind from the context within which it sits, as minds are embodied in the world, coping with the world. And the world isn’t a mental representation to us in the first instance, we experience the world through its own thingness.
We experience this thingness through acting in the world with particular intents. Things to us are primarily in terms of the actions they facilitate. As Paul Dourish notes in Where the Action is, we don't say "that is a chair, that is for sitting", we just sit. This is true for digital interfaces as well. If you’ve ever done or seen user testing, you’ve undoubtedly been astounded at how a user may not ‘see’ certain interface elements that are obvious to you, simply because on-screen signifiers may not align with the intents behind their actions.
So a certain reality - an ontology - is ‘revealed’ - as Heidegger called it - to us via our coping with our being-in-the-world. This revealing isn’t something considered, it’s a given by virtue of our circumstance.
But design seeks to impose an ontology. That’s not to say that ontological perspectives of users can’t be different than those of designers, but design aims to dissuade reflection, and makes normal the ontological presuppositions of the designer. These presuppositions ‘reveal’ a world to us.
The epistemological dimension - How to reveal
As I wrote in subsequent newsletters, the method of revealing impacts not only what our world is, but how we come to know our world. Digital technology in particular shapes how we learn about our world. A phone facilitates web browsing, phone calls, web browsing, app usage, yes, but it also displays knowledge in some ways more than others, and engenders ways of learning and expectations of how things are disseminated. The media theorist Marshall Mcluhan here is insightful, from Understanding Media:
“The medium is the message because it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action.”
The way we come to know about our world is structured by particular designed systems that aren’t neutral in how the elucidate; indeed, designed products aren’t usually aimed at elucidating, but rather capitalising. With digital technology this is as true as anywhere else, interfaces reinforce pre-existing structures rather than the legibility of the structure.
I gave the example of how Spotify is far more interested in presenting you with interfaces intended to keep listening, rather than interfaces which would get you to consider and interrogate what you are listening to or your listening habits (and this omission is only brought more into focus by the "Spotify Unwrapped" personal listening analysis they deign to give you once a year).
I also gave the example of Google Maps. I noted that it reveals certain businesses but not others at certain zoom levels - and doesn’t even bother to explain why. The 'revealing structure' is hidden.
We learn - and accept that we learn - through the filter of corporations. There is little incentive for private companies to show you how and why particular content is being deliver to you in particular ways. Indeed, revealing something cannot help but hide other things, as noted by Asle H. Kiran:
"Enhancing phenomena in the world is done because we want to focus on some particular aspect. Not letting this being accompanied by a corresponding reduction of other aspects will create noise and impede perception, of the scientific type as well as the everyday type."
In showing us things companies not only hide other things, they also hide the mechanism that determines what goes behind the veil and what is allowed to be seen. Again, this isn’t to say that our epistemology is fully determined by technology, but that dasein is - as noted - about acting rather that learning and reflecting, and capital and design do little to change this. This is problematic when dasein is designed and shaped by actors with an array of vested, ambiguous interests with may or may to align with everyones idea of a better world.
The practical dimension - How to how to
Given that what we perceive (ontology) and how we understand (epistemology) is shaped through technology, it stands to reason that how we act in the world is in turn affected. In this way dasein makes - as Heidegger would say - ‘a call’ or ‘claim’ upon humans for some necessary response. Here, Heidegger is more technologically deterministic (i.e. technology determines human action) than I’d like. Instead, it is perhaps wiser to capture the nuance of how technology shapes our actions by claiming it affords particular capacities.
I spoke to technology theorist Dr. Jenny L. Davis about affordances. She discussed how technology does not afford in a vacuum, rather, we must consider how technology affords for whom and under what circumstances. In other words, technology can request, demand, encourage, discourage, refuse, and allow particular actions and thoughts to different types of people and to different degrees.
So what sorts of actions does technology tend to encourage, and tend to discourage? Acting within dasein, not upon it. That is, within mechanistic expectation; I listen to Spotify rather than interrogating my musical choices, I use Google Maps to go somewhere rather than investigate if what is shown is what is there (I only do that if I go a place and what Google Maps says is there isn’t there - ‘breakdown’).
I discussed how technology exacerbates and escalates pre-existing dispositions toward purchasing, toward worrying, toward reinforcing, rather than enabling actions that tug on the curtain to reveal what's beneath.
The internalising-externalising dimension - How to interweave
Whether we like it or not, we have to cope with these affordances. 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. Hence, we become habituated to them.
I discussed how we internalise technological affordances through this habituated behaviour. Spreadsheets encourage linearity of thought and demand single levels of granularity and discrete categories. They discourage non-linear, fuzzy thinking. We internalise these constraints in our psychologies and social structures, and then, cyclically, reify them back as material things.
But our cognition isn’t a one way street - we externalise it into the world as much as we internalise the world into our cognition.
I wrote a newsletter about this, giving the example of how a wardrobe is not just a storage receptacle for your clothes. It also acts as an external container for your memories. Browsing your wardrobe is a cognitive action, to remind yourself of the various items of clothing that you have (these behaviours are known as ‘epistemic actions’). You needn't remember all the clothes you have - you simply don't have to - because they are there to act as reminders of themselves in self-contained yet externalised way.
But more than that, externalised memories can act as reminders of why we were interacting with something. A browser tab you have open of a search you conducted about wolves would both be how you engage in your interest in the difference between dogs and wolves and a reminder of your particular curiosity in the subject.
Through this sort of cognitive extension, we can see how this process is a bilateral internal-external interweaving.
The meaningful dimension - How to mark
But in order for the world to act as a reminder of itself, a part of the world has to mean something to us. It can’t be an undifferentiated mass, otherwise it would lose all signifying qualities. And the way we as humans make meaning out of things is, more often than not, by ‘marking’ the world, through some type of interaction.
Digital technology is both difficult and easy to impart personal meaning into. Difficult because digital technology is impermanent by nature, but easy as it should be simple to ‘make a mark’ on a technology that is inherently interactive. But this ‘mark’ can only be made if an interface is able to be integrated into the sinews of our intentions and memories. That is, if we can manipulate a digital object in a way that we can attach meaning to. We, as 'users' of digital technology, attempt to integrate this momentary interface into the continuity of our lives, into signs that mean things to us.
I wrote about how the problem is that technologies - and digital interfaces in particular - are territorialised - to use a Deleuzian term - by software companies to such a degree that it leaves us unable to 'make our mark' on them, despite their supposed flexibility.
So there you have it. The story so far. A whistle-stop tour (as the British say) of the story, but a tour nonetheless.
One of the objectives of this newsletter is to provide conceptual clarity on how we exist with technology - and how we could make this existence better. Have I succeeded thus far? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Till next time.