6 research outputs found
Image, Science and Technology: a Post-phenomenological Approach. Entrevista com Don Ihde
Image, Science and Technology: a Post-phenomenological Approach. Entrevista com Don Ihd
Tech Imaginations
Prof. Dr. Jens Schröter, Christoph Borbach, Max Kanderske und Prof. Dr. Benjamin Beil sind Herausgeber der Reihe. Die Herausgeber*innen der einzelnen Hefte sind renommierte Wissenschaftler*innen aus dem In- und Ausland.Technologies and especially media technologies are pervasive in modern societies. But even more omnipresent are the imaginaries of modern technologies – what technologies are thought to be capable of or what effects they are supposed to have. These imaginations reveal a lot of the political and ideological self-descriptions of societies, hence the (techno-)imaginary also functions as a kind of epistemic tool.
Concepts of the imaginary therefore have experienced an increasing attention in cultural theory and the social sciences in recent years. In particular, work from political philosophy, but also approaches from science and technology studies (STS) or communication and media studies are worth mentioning here. The term "techno-imagination", coined by Vilém Flusser in the early 1990s, refers to the close interconnection of (digital) media and imaginations, whose coupling can not only be understood as a driver of future technology via fictional discourses (e.g. science fiction), but much more fundamentally also as a constitutive element of society and sociality itself, as Castoriadis has argued.
In the first part of the issue several theoretical contributions add new aspects to the discussion of socio-technical imaginaries, while in the second part a workshop held in January 2022 at the CAIS in Bochum is documented, in which the case of the imaginaries of “Future Internets” was discussed
Wall-Window-Screen: How the Cell Phone Mediates a Worldview for Us
The article proposes to model the phenomenon of the cell phone as
a wall-window. This model aims at explicating some of the
perceptions and experiences associated with cellular technology.
The wall-window model means that the cell phone simultaneously
separates the user from the physical surroundings (the wall), and
connects the user to a remote space (the window). The remote space
may be where the interlocutor resides or where information is
stored (e.g. the Internet). Most cell phone usage patterns are
modeled as a single dimension according to the level of distraction
or attention of the user. In order to accommodate nuanced situations
such as augmented reality, I suggest a two-dimensional layout: the
wall-window. The wall represents the attention to the immediate
physical environment, while the window represents the attention to
a remote space. The wall-window model further evolves once a
screen is woven into this layout. This addition is easily understood
due to the screen’s etymology, which is associated with the
concepts of shield or barrier. From a technical perspective, the
screen has become an integral part of the cell phone. Furthermore, a
screen itself is both a wall and a window. Lastly, once a cell phone
is supplemented with a screen, it is easier to refer to it as media.
And again, media fits into the wall-window model