The following paper offers a political and philosophical reading of ethically informed technological design practices to critically tackle the implicit regulative ideal in the design of social media as a means to digitally represent the liberal public sphere. The paper proposes that, when it comes to the case of social media platforms, understood along with the machine learning algorithms embedded in them as algorithmic technologies, ethically informed design has an implicit conception of democracy that parallels that of Jürgen Habermas’ procedural (...) democracy (Habermas, J. (1994). THREE NORMATIVE MODELS OF DEMOCRACY. Jurgen Habermas, 1(1).). That is, that democratic practices are encodable as procedures that produce valid discussion forums. Opposed to this, this paper suggests a turn to philosopher Jacques Rancière’s conception of politics as a guiding attitude towards technological design. This is done by, on the one side, using Rancière’s notions of “disagreement” and “distribution of the sensible” as the political starting point for the practice of design of algorithmic technologies. And, on the other, inspired by Karen Barad’s theories on agential realism (Barad, K. (2003). Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28(3), 801–831. https://doi.org/10.1086/345321), by putting forward a political ontology of algorithmic technologies that reconceptualizes them in terms of how they assemble open-ended practices between human bodies and technological devices. (shrink)

Constellations, Volume 28, Issue 4, Page 570-587, December 2021.

Scholarship on the politics of new media widely assumes that communication functions as a sufficient conceptual paradigm for critically assessing new media politics. This article argues that communication-centric analyses fail to engage the politics of information itself, limiting information only to its consequences for communication, and neglecting information as it reaches into our selves, lives, and actions beyond the confines of communication. Furthering recent new media historiography on the “information theory” of Shannon and Wiener, the article reveals both the primacy (...) of communication in midcentury information theory, and also a striking resonance between these postwar communication theories and Habermas’s more recent communicative theory of democracy. To achieve a critical perspective beyond communication, the article proposes a media genealogy of the politics of subjects as a methodology for developing an analysis of how information formats us as subjects of data. (shrink)

In this article, I explore the promise and pitfalls of medium as environment by tracking the twin developments of environmental thinking and set design in China, considering it as a problematic of epistemology, technology, and aesthetics. I treat huanjing (environment) as a neologism, a new episteme, a dispositif, and a mode of power, taking set design as the companion medium that reconnects art and technology, aesthetics and politics. Reconceptualizing set, design, and environment at the intersection of industrial design and progressive (...) education, I focus on modernist and propagandistic practice of set design in China in the 1930s and ’40s, moving from set design in film and theater to the design and practice of human/environment that constitutes the landscape of the social. How these aesthetic and technical experiments rework the social will help us reconfigure the human in the reassemblage of our medium/environment complex. (shrink)