New Technology and the Post-human Self: Rethinking Appropriation and Resistance

摘要

In keeping with the current appreciation for the sociomateriality of technology-enabled practice, we are now advised to de-center human beings and to situate them as but one component among many in complex networks of heterogeneous actors. More radical still, we are counseled to question the very premise of distinctive subjects and objects. Human actors and technological artifacts are increasingly seen to have no independent status of their own, but to emerge in a mutually constitutive way from the unfolding of ordinary practices. This essay explores the implications of this line of thinking for people's practical encounters with new information technologies. We begin by considering how the individual's engagement with spaces, materials, and technologies builds upon a fundamental embodiment of mind and then extends outward in a way that makes flexible and expansive the effective boundaries of the self. On the other hand, we observe that the kind of fusion this implies is not ontologically given, but emerges through the active and disciplined engagement of the human practitioner. Acknowledging that the materiality of the post-human self is, in fact, a human accomplishment can yield a richer understanding of two opposed phenomena at the core of our discipline: the expert appropriation of information technologies, and user resistance to systems imposed by other interests.