Fitness apps on mobile devices are gaining popularity, as more people are engaging in self-tracking activities to record their status of fitness and exercise routines. These technologies also evolved from simply recording steps and offering exercise suggestions to an integrated lifestyle guide for physical wellbeing, thus exemplify a new era of "quantified self" in the context of health as individual responsibility. There is a considerable amount of literature in science, technology and society (STS) studies looking at this phenomenon from different (...) perspectives, linking it with the sociology of self-surveillance and neoliberal regimes of health. However, the human-technology interface, through which the micro- (behavioral) and macro- (social) aspects converge, still calls for extensive examination. This paper approaches this topic from the postphenomenological perspective, in combination with empirical studies of design analysis and interviews of fitness apps, to reveal the human-technology link between the design elements and people's perception through the direct experiences and interpretations of technology. It argues that the intentionality of self-tracking fitness app designs mediates the human-technology relations by "guiding" people into a quantified knowledge regime. It shapes the perceptions of fitness and health with representations of meanings about a "good life" of individual success and management. This paper also gives a critique of current individual, performance-oriented fitness app designs and offers the possibility of seeking alternatives through the multistable nature of human-technology relations—how altering interpretation and meaning of the design with a cultural or social context could change the form of technological embodiment. (shrink)

A central issue in postphenomenology is how to explain the multistability of technologies: how can it be that specific technologies can be used for a wide variety of purposes (the “multi”), while not for all purposes (the “stability”)? For example, a table can be used for the purpose of sleeping, having dinner at, or even for staging a fencing match, but not for baking a cake. One explanation offered in the literature is that the (material) design of a technology puts (...) constraints on the purposes for which technologies can be used. In this paper, I argue that such an explanation—while partly correct—fails to address the role of the environment in which human beings operate in putting constraints on technology use. I suggest that James Gibson’s affordance theory helps highlighting how stabilities in technology use arise in the interaction between human being and environment. Building on more recent approaches in affordance theory, I suggest that the environment can be conceptualized as a “rich landscape of affordances” that solicits certain actions, which are not just cued by the environment’s material structure, but also by the normativity present in the form of life in which a human being participates. I briefly contrast the approach to affordances developed in this paper with how Klenk (2020) and Tollon (2021) have conceptualized the “affordance character” of technological artifacts, and highlight how a focus on the situated nature of affordances augments these earlier conceptualizations. (shrink)

How should we understand postphenomenological methodology? Postphenomenology is a research perspective which builds on phenomenological and pragmatist philosophy to explore human–technology relations, but one with open methodological questions. Here, I offer some thoughts on the epistemological processes that should be (and often implicitly may be) at work in this research. In particular, I am concerned with postphenomenological research on technological “multistability,” i.e., a device’s ever-present capacity to be used for a variety of purposes, and to always be meaningful in multiple (...) ways. I develop a methodology called “variational cross-examination,” which entails the critical contrast of a device’s various stabilities. As a set of instructive examples, I draw on my own line of research on the politics of public spaces, and especially the critique of anti-homeless design. (shrink)

Philosophical and technoculture studies surrounding the existential understanding of the human–technology–world experience have seen a slow but steady increase that makes a turn to material hermeneutics in the second decade of the twenty-first century (Ihde in Postphenomenology: essays in the postmodern context. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, 1993; Capurro in AI Soc 25(1):35–42, 2010; Romele in Digital hermeneutics: philosophical investigations in new media and technologies. Routledge, Abingdon, 2020; among others). This renewed focus makes sense because human–technology–world experiences need to be interpreted. (...) And many of these are more complicated to study, precisely because technology is at the root of the experiences. One interesting subset of technologies is media technologies, also called digital media, which intertwines the device and the content to mediate together in the world (Irwin in Digital media: human-technology connection. Lexington Books, Lanham, 2016). Visual media technologies and media content, together, through what is called moving image technologies, create virtual role-playing, virtual and augmented reality, video games, and social media focused worlds that have become central experiences in contemporary culture. Just as image-based scientific instruments read the world in different ways, so to do these visual mediated experiences. How might this comingled “reading” of technology explain the digital film language and experience? I contend that understanding the existential “early” film experience helps understand the new age of cinema, with implications for digital media, digital representation of the visual, and technoscience and technoculture studies. The material hermeneutics perspective called postphenomenology is one way to study these visually focused human–technology–world perceptual and interpretive experiences. Don Ihde’s methodological framework (1990, 1993, 1996, 2002, 2010, 2012, 2016, 2019) is both an idea from technoscience studies and a set of nuanced vocabulary that helps to explore and reveal variations, patterns, and trajectories of the whole-body experience of technology. This use case will first explore traditional cinema and then the “new age” term “moving image”, to learn more about this complicated and radically transforming technological experience. Work by Don Ihde and Vivian Sobchack is considered. (shrink)

This paper aims to show a possible path to address the introduction of intimate digital technologies through a phenomenological and postphenomenological perspective in relation to Japanese and Chinese contexts. Digital technologies are becoming intimate, and, in Japan and China, there are already many advanced digital technologies that provide digital companions for love relationships. Phenomenology has extensive research on how love relationships and intimacy shape the subjects. At the same time, postphenomenology provides a sound framework on how technologies shape the values (...) and meanings we have. Thus, this paper introduces two digital technologies in Japan and China (_Love Plus_ and _XiaoIce_ chatbot), and it analyses according to the elements proposed by phenomenology and postphenomenology. In conclusion, this paper shows how digital companions like _Love Plus_ and _XiaoIce_ chatbot change who we are and the values and meanings we have according to the phenomenological and postphenomenological framework. These entities might not be human, but they shape who we are as human beings and the meanings and value we give to love. (shrink)

The purpose of the present article is to contribute to the postphenomenological theory of technological mediation by introducing a new type of ‘human-technology’ relation named ‘transcending mediation’. Previously postphenomenology didn’t pay much attention to the role technology plays in mediating human relation to Transcendence. This was because of empirical turn and pragmatism that are anti-metaphysical in their nature. In the present paper, however, I will show that the empirical element of technology can be balanced by some metaphysical findings. Keeping this (...) in mind, I will rely on Karl Jaspers’s metaphysics of ciphers in order to demonstrate how technology mediates not only our relation to the world but also shapes human’s relation to Transcendence. As I am going to show in the present paper, this sort of mediation becomes possible because technologies are actively participating in so-called self-transcending practices. The latter, according to Karl Jaspers, are practices through which humans can elucidate one’s true self (e.g., become an Existenz). In this article, I will take a case of Smart education as a particular type of self-transcending practice and will show how contemporary AI educational systems enable and disable particular forms of becoming true self (Existenz). (shrink)

Postphenomenology was envisaged to lay bare the black box of technology through a phenomenological approach. The vision, in this sense, was to identify how technology might mediate both the subjectivity of its immediate user and the world around her. In this paper I will argue that to cognize technology’s effects fully, we need to enrich postphenomenology with further insights. In particular, SCOT and ANT may be integrated into postphenomenology. While the former can provide a historical narrative of how technology has (...) evolved throughout time, the latter may embed technology within a network where the interplay of the technology, the first user, other individuals and the society, on the whole, can be depicted. After a preliminary theoretical discussion, I will go through some case studies to articulate how SCOT and ANT can make a contribution to a systematic investigation of technology. (shrink)

What is the relation between material hermeneutics, bodies, perception and materials? In this article, I shall argue cultural learning processes tie them together. Three aspects of learning can be identified in cultural learning processes. First, all learning is tied to cultural practices. Second, all learning in cultural practice entangle humans’ ability to recognize a material world conceptually, and finally the boundaries of objects, the object we perceive, are set by shifting material-conceptual entanglements. All these aspects are important for material hermeneutics (...) in a technoculture. Postphenomenology has expanded the connection between hermeneutics and phenomenology by focusing on studies of how perception, bodies, materials, the sensual realm and hermeneutics are entwined when we perceive the world through technologies. Following Don Ihde, hermeneutics expands beyond interpretation of texts in the humanities. We can interpret materials as for instance animal bones to make new sense of the Bible. New technologies have expanded material hermeneutics, when we can ‘look’ into bodies and ‘perceive’ below surfaces. Interpretation via such tools in a technoculture, both limit and extend our hermeneutic horizons in the humanities as well as in the natural sciences. Furthermore, from the perspective of cultural learning processes, material hermeneutics in the human and natural sciences depend on more than mediating instruments. Material hermeneutics also involve the material cultural environments of scientific apparatuses and the scientists’ processes of learning in cultural practice. This changes the focus from relations in postphenomenology to processes of relations. (shrink)