Abstract
New media incessantly create objects. The burgeoning of new media artefacts has formed various areas of study: Free Labour, Networks, F/OSS, Software Studies, Cyberspace and Digital Methods. These are informed by methodologies such as mediatisation, media ecology and media archaeology, post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, cybernetics phenomenology and postphenomenology. Postphenomenology helps analyse new media, the editors of Postphenomenology and Media inform us, through locating how they are ‘moving into our bodies, or at least into our bodily activity and behaviour’, which ultimately creates an environment of media ‘ubiquity, digitality, and seamlessness’ (p. xxvii). In order to unpick this fluid state, postphenomenology is ‘specifically oriented towards an analysis of transparency-opacity ratios, multistability, multiple types of human-technology-world relations, perception and understanding, micro- and macroperception dynamics’ (p. xxvi). The collection looks at how postphenomenology can tackle new media in three parts: the first part aims at ‘scouting the perimeters’ of new media to provide a framework for the rest of the book, part two uses case studies to outline how postphenomenology can be applied and part three examines postphenomenology as a ‘conceptual toolbox’ to see if it should be ‘fine-tuned and/or expanded’ (p. xxviii).
Heather Wiltse’s chapter in part one stands out as an example of how postphenomenology looks to give greater lexical depth in understanding how to analyse new media. Wiltse does this through updating Heidegger’s concept of ‘present-to-hand or ready-to-hand’, with the term ‘mediating (Infra)structures’ (p. 4). In emphasising the prefix infra, Latin for below, the author highlights how a postphenomenological perspective is concerned with what is below a consensus perspective of media, which could be in the words of the editors, what are the ‘micro- and macroperception dynamics’ (p. xxvi). Wiltse’s aim is, as with the majority of the essays in part one, to outline the boundaries of postphenomenology, and so she leaves the reader with a series of questions as to how her concept can examine new media. Her aim is to establish being in the order of finding the ‘when, where, and how’ of the digital technological assemblage as opposed to the ‘real or the not real’ of the representation that they give (p. 21). Here, Wiltse uses postphenomenology as a means to go beyond media theory concepts of representation and looks for an investigative questioning into the practicality of new media.
Part two is constructed around case studies looking at the specific examples in new media and how they can be examined with a postphenomenological lens. A notable contribution in this section comes from one of the editors of the book (Stacey O. Irwin) and her chapter titled ‘Multimedia Stabilities: Exploring the GoPro Experience’. Irwin outlines that an aim of the postphenomenological method is to focus on how ‘‘media-makers’ experience using multimedia’ in order ‘to study technological mediation’ (p. 103). Irwin goes on to elaborate the postphenomenological aim by stating that it is intended to locate the ‘the sociocultural situatedness and the embodied practice of a technology-focused experience. The crux of a human-technology relation is the connection, the entanglement, and the relation between human and technology’ (p. 104). This is similar to Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the chiasm through which ‘we situate ourselves in ourselves and in the things, in ourselves and in the other, at the point where, by a sort of chiasm, we become the others and we become world’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1968: 160). Merleau-Ponty establishes a relation of subject-world, postphenomenology specifically creates a ‘Human-Media-World relations’ and Irwin drills down further in her essay to establish an ‘I-GoPro-World schema’ (p. 109). Through her analysis of the GoPro she gives a sensory account of the phenomena of the GoPro, concluding that ‘the crux of the human-technology connection begins in embodiment relations, where the technology becomes perceptually transparent’ (p. 116).
Part three looks at mining the philosophical potential of postphenomenology. Lars Botin’s chapter ‘Sublime Embodiment of the Media’ reemphasises a predominant theme running throughout the book of humanity and its inseparability from technology. Botin calls for an understanding of technology that cannot be separated from the body and functions as both the sublime and the sublimated element within the body. Botin states that this is not something to be halted or separated from but instead calls this state ‘eutopia’, by which the author means ‘good-place’ (p. 167). The word is a portmanteau of the Greek word ‘eu’ which is translated as good, and again the Greek ‘topia’ or ‘topos’ being place. The essay calls for a heightened awareness of how, like Ihde’s example of the spider and the spider’s web, that is both ‘extension and amplification’ of the spider (p.169), humans are co-constituted by media in ways that should be embraced, rather than negated. Through the act of embracing the embodiment of new media there exists a ‘constant opening toward possibilities and potentials for our body to perform in multiple, meaningful, and responsible ways’ (p.182).
The pressing issue of our technological entanglements requires analysis of various forms; what postphenomenology offers is a framework that deals with the situatedness of the human in the flux of what the theorists of postphenomenology call our human-media-world relations. This triad of meaning can be seen to be responsive to Heidegger’s three-fold vertical relation between humans, animals and objects, allocating human uniqueness based on our ability to be ‘world-forming’ (Heidegger, 1996: 177). Some have found this claim of Heidegger’s problematic and see it as a refusal to annihilate ‘human exceptionalism’ ( Westling, 2014 : 47). Postphenomenology recasts Heidegger’s formulation, creating a distance but not a disjuncture from his phenomenological method. Therefore, it can be seen that the tenets of the postphenomenological method relies on certain aspects of Heidegger’s phenomenology and therefore does not fully readdress the epistemological or ontological conditions that allow human exceptionalism to dissimulate through phenomenological considerations of being. Nevertheless, the book supplies well-considered essays that offer insightful ways for understanding how humanity is intimately and imminently linked to new media technologies, while also providing a solid methodological underpinning for students to carry out their own enquiries.
