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This lecture exists as slides, and it’s far more in-depth.
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In this class, when we are discussing a technology, you’ll often hear me ask you “what’s at stake?” What does this technology have to do with anything? Why is it important? How does it connect to life outside itself?
This question can be challenging to answer, but is a critical task for visual culture and graphic design in particular. This can be the key to making a viewer actually engage with your information.
When you’re working with a subject, I want you to do more than just explain information. I want you to tell me why you care.
How does it affect life? Society? Money? Fun? Freedom? Sexuality? Fairness?
This lecture intends to give you one methodology for how you might answer that question. It relates to our class’ overall inquiry about how technology relates to to systems of power. Specifically, this methodology prompts you to think about how a technology affects three important parts of society: identity, knowledge, and truth. For the sake of simplicity, let’s call these three things constructs. In this way, we follow Michel Foucault’s idea that power is productive. Our goal is to think about technology facilitates (or interferes with) this production.
Let’s explain what we mean when talk about social reality by looking at three dimensions of it Each of these is a construct: some sort of idea that is produced by society.
When we say identity, we are talking about the categories we put people into, or the categories we find ourselves in. How does a technology change the way you think about what’s possible for your life?
For example, the internet may afford a person access to porn which they use to explore their sexuality. This might feel like getting to know oneself better. In turn, American society hates porn, and this cultural value may result in our friend thinking of this self-exploration as shameful. This flip-flopping of desire and shame produce an erratic person or one who thinks of sex itself as shameful.
When we say knowledge, we are talking about the theories, ideas, and frameworks that are possible because of a subject. What type of intellectual material comes out a technology? Does it produce an educational field of study? Do industries and jobs form around it?
For example, online banking has become the dominant interface between people and banks. As a result, entire industries and academic disciplines have developed around financial technology and cybersecurity. Additionally, since online banking does not facilitate cash withdraws, it facilitates a dominant thinking of money as detached from physical value. Funds directly deposit to your bank account, and they leave through tap-to-pay smartphones.
When we say truth, we are talking about the dominant ideologies in a society: the ones that are unquestionable but at the end of the day not empirically true. In a sense, even what can be considered evidence is a result of the dominant ideology. Does a technology produce anything that is used as evidence elsewhere? What does it have to do with an assumption at the core of an ideology?
For example, police officer body cameras construct an ideology that an officer is giving the truth, since it has to align with the video evidence. In reality, officers have the ability to turn the cameras on and off at their discretion. Moreover, the first-person video perspective does not necessarily offer the most useful view of a situation and may have an ambiguous interpretation. Then, when combined with the officer’s verbal account (which is held as unquestionable) its ambiguity is resolved.
Remember, in all these questions, we are interested in the technology’s entire lifecycle: not only its uses but also its birth, its destruction, and its hauntings.
This methodology instructs you to think about how a specific technology affects either identity, knowledge, or truth along a particular pathway. Your objective is to trace a path that moves from the technology through various midpoints until arriving at its destination. The midpoints will change based on the destination, based on what might be most helpful for thinking through cause and effect. The destination will effectively be your answer to the question, “what is at stake with this technology?”
Think about this pathway like you are telling a story. How do the effects you describe in the first stage become causes in the second stage?
Your pathway does not need to be an exhaustive account of the technology. I’m not asking you to catalog every relevant point about the technology. Instead, I want you to think through a narrow storyline that might drive.