The Environmental Teapot and Other Loaded Household Objects: Reconnecting the Politics of Technology, Issues and Things

This book chapter discusses the concept of the politics of objects through a specific empirical example, tea teapots equipped to facilitate environmental awareness and action. It distinguishes between two different forms of object politics: the politics of scripted objects and the politics of augmented objects. Where the former object is political by virtue of the contraints it places on subjects, the latter's politics derive from its capacity to resonate with issues. Here the range of issues the object is capable to confure up - its issuefication - is the principal index of its politicization. The latter form of object politics can be recognized in contemporary objects that are equipped with digital technologies (such as environmental teapots). But it can also be traced back to the pragmatist philosophy of John Dewey, the object-centred theory of morality and politics proposed by him. The chapter concludes with a discusion of the empirical methods that may be deployed to detect and analyse the politics of augmented objects, in particular textual and visual analysis

Algorithmic Differentiation of Society – a Luhmann Perspective on the Societal Impact of Digital Media

The aim of this article is to put forward Luhmann's theory of social differentiation as the way society as a social system has organized itself internally after it has differentiated itself out from its external environment. The question discussed is if we are facing a new form of differentiation triggered by digital media. To answer the question, the article puts forward Luhmann´s theory and the historical forms of differentiation he described. After that the article shows how the triggering factor, in a non-deterministic way, for Luhmann is communication media. A new differentiation form emerges when the dynamic and complexity of society has increased to such an extent, i.e., other forms of differentiation have grown in latency, that a new form can take over. After the introduction to the theory and the interpretations of it, it is discussed if and how a new form of differentiation is under development. The discussion circles around how to interpret contemporary developments as signs of how the new differentiation form works. The article concludes that functional differentiation is surpassed by a new basic form of differentiation which is the algorithmic differentiation of society

A Social Informatics Perspective on Socio-Technical Networks

Network-centric perspectives have gained increasing salience, as interconnected information and communication technologies (ICTs) become more ubiquitous in our daily lives. In this paper, we provide an overview of socio-technical network studies, which we then use to help situate the development and use of ICTs within social and organizational domains. We briefly review traditional conceptualizations of socio-technical systems, and then introduce some contemporary theoretical extensions and sociological reconceptualizations. This discussion emphasizes the capability of social informatics perspectives to guide our current and future examinations of ICT use in sociotechnical networks