Schedule FSCONS X

This paper will explore the intersection between technological development and social fragmentation. Since it has been claimed that we have entered a phase of ‘everyware’ (Greenfield, 2006), wherein software is ubiquitous in everyday life, debate has since been sparked amongst empirical literature about the impact digital saturation has upon forms of human consciousness. Discourses of ‘automation anxiety’ are abundant, whereby the rise of the digital is positioned as the nexus of problems pertaining to mass unemployment, the development of fragmented modes of concentration in software users, and a subsequent dwindling in human agency. These arguments rely upon the discursive distinction between the human and non-human (both artificial and non-artificial), whereby the two are separated into two distinct ontological spheres.

However, automation and technological development are not new phenomena emerging concurrently with the rise of the digital. Rather, societal fears of automation inhibiting skill are discussed extensively amongst early media theory, whereby humans and non-humans are said to have always co-existed (Mumford, 1934; Ellul, 1954). In accordance with this, I argue that the distillation of humans and non-humans into two distinct ontological spheres - as discourses that blame a loss of human agency on digitalisation tend to do - can inadvertently limit our capacity to engage critically with technology. In so, a more sensitive account of the human and the non-human would better understand the objectives of computational capitalism as becoming indistinguishable from its digital products.

This talk forms part of my ongoing three-year doctoral research, and in such is work in progress.

Info

Day: 2016-11-13
Start time: 15:15
Duration: 00:45
Room: Conference Room
Track: FSCONS X
Language:

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