Digital technologies are frequently considered as lacking material aspects. Today, it is evident that behind digital technologies lies a huge and complex material infrastructure in the form of fiber optic cables, servers, satellites, and screens. Postphenomenology has theorized the relations to material things as embodiment relations. Taking into account that technologies can also have hermeneutic aspects, this theory defines hermeneutic relations as those in which we read the world through technologies. The article opens with a review of some theoretical developments (...) to hermeneutic relations with a special focus on digital technologies. The article suggests that in the digital world, material hermeneutics needs to be updated as it shifts from a scientific to an everyday technological context. Now, technologies not only “give voice” to things, they also produce new meanings to informational structures and direct users to certain meanings. When it comes to digital technologies, especially those involving artificial intelligence, the technology actively mediates the world. In postphenomenological terms, it possesses a technological intentionality. The postphenomenological formula should be updated to reflect this type of technological intentionality, by reversing the arrow of intentionality so that it points to the user, rather than from the user. (shrink)

Why does a cell phone have a screen? From televisions and cell phones to refrigerators, many contemporary technologies come with a screen. The article aims at answering this question by employing Emmanuel Levinas’ notions of the Other and the face. This article also engages with Don Ihde’s conceptualization of alterity relations, in which the technological acts as quasi-other with which we maintain relations. If technology is a quasi-other, then, I claim, the screen is the quasi-face. By exploring Levinas’ ontology, specifically (...) what can be identified as his tool analysis, as well as his notion of the face, a new understanding of contemporary technologies can be extracted. Some of these technologies hardly fit into the Heideggerian notion of the hand as the main interface to artifacts. Instead they require the face. Levinas’ notion of the face is analyzed from an ontological perspective and developed in conjunction with the screen. As the screen serves as a quasi-face, it enables the construction of quasi-other technological artifacts. (shrink)

This book is the first postphenomenological analysis of the important roles the cellphone plays in contemporary everydayness. It is an example of a new methodology to study everyday technologies that combines historical research with a philosophical investigation.

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. (shrink)

Today's navigation is different, with no paper map or compass. Instead we use a cellphone that has a built-in GPS. Such cellphone is also equipped with an embedded camera that can read signs in various languages and barcodes that most humans cannot decipher. Combined, the GPS and the camera participate in the production and exercise of augmented reality, where reality is presented with layers of information which are accessible only through technological mediation. Currently such mediation is enabled by the cellphone, (...) thereby providing novel dimensions to our experience of mobility. Consequently it produces innovative ways of navigation and a new sensation of reality. (shrink)

Postphenomenology and Media: Essays on Human–Media–World Relations explores our contemporary media landscape from the unique perspective of postphenomenology. This volume for the first time puts the central concepts of postphenomenology to work for the specific analysis of new, digital media—thus delivering a wholly innovative take on their study.

Guest editor 's introduction to a special issue on the question of whether it is dangerous to drive while talking on the mobile phone and the philosophical questions that emerge from this debate.

The question of whether animals have technologies is studied in this article in three genealogical steps according to the development of human technologies: tools, machines and digital technologies. In the age of tools, animals were regarded as lacking technologies. In the age of machines, observations in animals show tool usage. However, Marx attributes both machines and tools only to humans in order to avoid a break between premodern humanity that had only tools, to modern humanity that invented and used machines. (...) In the age of digital technologies, animals have been observed using and inventing tools as well as complex technics like language and agriculture. These genealogical steps conform to Calarco’s mapping of animality into identity, difference and indifference, which allow us to think not only of the identity between humans’ and animals’ technologies but also of the differences. (shrink)

This commentary is an attempt to rethink the ethics of taking care in posthumanist times. It is an effort to combine ethics, posthumanism and psychological theories. I examine how the psychological notion of long-term well-being can serve as an ethical yardstick and how it can be relevant to non-humans.

The rise of AI-based systems has been accompanied by the belief that these systems are impartial and do not suffer from the biases that humans and older technologies express. It becomes evident, however, that gender and racial biases exist in some AI algorithms. The question is where the bias is rooted—in the training dataset or in the algorithm? Is it a linguistic issue or a broader sociological current? Works in feminist philosophy of technology and behavioral economics reveal the gender bias (...) in AI technologies as a multi-faceted phenomenon, and the linguistic explanation as too narrow. The next step moves from the linguistic aspects to the relational ones, with postphenomenology. One of the analytical tools of this theory is the “I-technology-world” formula that models our relations with technologies, and through them—with the world. Realizing that AI technologies give rise to new types of relations in which the technology has an “enhanced technological intentionality”, a new formula is suggested: “I-algorithm-dataset.” In the third part of the article, four types of solutions to the gender bias in AI are reviewed: ignoring any reference to gender, revealing the considerations that led the algorithm to decide, designing algorithms that are not biased, or lastly, involving humans in the process. In order to avoid gender bias, we can recall a feminist basic understanding—visibility matters. Users and developers should be aware of the possibility of gender and racial biases, and try to avoid them, bypass them, or exterminates them altogether. (shrink)

Attention has been addressed either as a distinction of a figure from background or as a searchlight scanning of a surface. In both ways, attention is limited to a single object. The aim of this article is to suggest a platform for an interpretation of multi-attention, that is, attention based on multiplicity of objects and spaces. The article describes how attention can be given to more than one object, based on the experiences of pilots, parents and car drivers.

The Onlife Manifesto rightfully points to the emergence of new forms of subjectivity in the digital age and how ICT calls for the re-distribution of tasks and responsibilities between humans and their technologies. However, Attention is still conceived in the Manifesto in modernist terms, as a problem of distraction. Within the terminology of Attention economy, the Manifesto is critical about the abuse of traditional forms of Attention, but does not make the next step to develop an alternative. In this chapter, (...) I elaborate on the notion of Attention and think of its new form in the digital age. A genealogy of the notion shows how Attention reflects the dominant technologies of a period. In the age of the printed book, Attention meant focusing on one activity at a time, and the background had to be silent and unnoticeable. In the age of radio and television, when stations and channels were switched with a single button, Attention was still focused on a single item but for shorter periods of time. Today, in the age of multi-processor computers and cell phones, Attention is distributed among tasks. In its distributed form, Attention can provide a subversive answer to the Attention economy that requires our undivided Attention. (shrink)

guest editors' introduction to a special issue on techno-anthropology.