Abstract
The postphenomenological framework of concepts—and especially the version utilized by the founder of this school of thought, Don Ihde—has proven useful for puncturing others’ totalizing or otherwise overgeneralizing claims about technology. However, does this specialization in deflating hype leave this perspective unable to identify the kinds of technological patterns necessary for contributing to activist interventions and political critique? Put differently, the postphenomenological perspective is committed to the study of concrete human-technology relations, and it eschews essentialist and fundamentalizing accounts of technology. Do these commitments render it incapable of providing general assessments of our contemporary technological situation? It is my contention that this perspective can indeed be useful for these kinds of critical projects. To do so, we must go beyond Ihde’s personal tendency to utilize postphenomenology mostly for deflating others’ hype, and explore this perspective’s distinctive potential for identifying ways that technologies can become set within problematic patterns of usage and design. My suggestion is that the postphenomenological notion of “multistability” (i.e., the idea that technologies are always open to multiple uses and meanings) can play a helpful role in these efforts, especially when combined with a conception of local, rather than totalizing, stabilizations of human-technology relationships.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Aagaard, J. (2015). Drawn to distraction: A qualitative study of off-task use of educational technology. Computers and Education, 87, 90–97.
Aagaard, J. (2018). Magnetic and multistable: Reinterpreting the affordances of educational technology. International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education, 15(1), 4.
Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Borgmann, A. (1984). Technology and the character of contemporary life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Borgmann, A. (2005). “Review of What Things Do, by Peter-Paul Verbeek.” Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. 01/08/2005. https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/24832-what-things-do-philosophical-reflections-ontechnologyagency-and-design/
Feenberg, A. (2017). Technosystem: The social life of reason. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Haraway, D. (1997). Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium. London: Routledge.
Hasse, C. (2015a). An anthropology of learning: On nested frictions in cultural ecologies. London: Springer.
Hasse, C. (2015b). Multistable roboethics. In J. K. B. O. Friis & R. P. Crease (Eds.), Technoscience and postphenomenology (pp. 169–180). Lanham: Lexington Books.
Hickman, L. (2007). Pragmatism as post-postmodernism. New York: Fordham University Press.
Ihde, D. (1990). Technology and the lifeworld. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press.
Ihde, D. (2008). Ironic technics. New York: Automatic Press/VIP.
Ihde, D. (2009). Postphenomenology and technoscience: The Peking University lectures. Albany: SUNY Press.
Ihde, D. (2016). Husserl’s missing technologies. New York: Fordham.
Irwin, S. O. (2016). Digital media: Human-technology connection. Lanham: Lexington Books.
Latour, B. (1999). Pandora’s hope. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Lemmens, P. (2017). Thinking through media: Stieglerian remarks on a possible postphenomenology of media. In Y. Van Den Eede, S. O. Irwin, & G. Weller (Eds.), Postphenomenology and media (pp. 185–206). Lanham: Lexington Books.
Lewis, R. S. (2017). Turning our back on art: A postphenomenological study of museum selfies. Kunstlicht, 38, 92–99.
Richardson, I. (2007). Pocket technospaces: The bodily incorporation of mobile media. Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, 21(2), 205–215.
Rosenberger, R. (2009). The sudden experience of the computer. AI and Society, 24, 173–180.
Rosenberger, R. (2011). A phenomenological defense of computer-simulated frog dissection. Techné, 15(3), 215–228.
Rosenberger, R. (2012). Embodied technology and the dangers of using the phone while driving. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 11, 79–94.
Rosenberger, R. (2017a). Callous objects: Designs against the homeless. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Rosenberger, R. (2017b). Notes on a nonfoundational phenomenology of technology. Foundations of Science, 22, 471–494.
Rosenberger, R. (2020). Backing up into advocacy: The case of smartphone driver distraction. Journal of Sociotechnical Critique, 1(1), 1–16.
Rosenberger, R., & Verbeek, P.-P. (Eds.). (2015). A field guide for postphenomenology. In Postphenomenological investigations (pp. 9–41). Lanham: Lexington Books.
Scharff, R. C. (2013). ‘Who’ is a ‘topical measuring’ postphenomenologist and how does one get that way? Foundations of Science, 18, 343–350.
Secomandi, F. (2017). Digital images and multistability in design practice. In Y. Van Den Eede, S. O. Irwin, & G. Weller (Eds.), Postphenomenology and media (pp. 123–143). Lanham: Lexington Books.
Van Den Eede, Y. (2015). Tracing the tracker: A postphenomenological inquiry into self-tracking technologies. In R. Rosenberger & P.-P. Verbeek (Eds.), Postphenomenological investigations (pp. 143–158). Lanham: Lexington Books.
Verbeek, P.-P. (2011). Moralizing technology. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Warfield, K. (2017). MirrorCameraRoom: The gendered multi-(in)stabilities of the selfie. Feminist Media Studies, 17(1), 77–92.
Wellner, G. (2016). A postphenomenological inquiry of cell phones. Lanham: Lexington Books.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
This comment refers to the article available at https://doi.org/10.1007/s10699-020-09731-8.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Rosenberger, R. Localizations of Dystopia. Found Sci 27, 709–715 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10699-020-09756-z
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10699-020-09756-z