Annotations ¶
In our experience and in what we do, technologies co-act our everyday choices and practices. In terms of a mantra that never seems to get old: “technology is not neutral” (but: what is it, instead?). Technologies persuade us, teach us, invite us, inhibit us, harm us, and thereby passively or actively contribute to the ethical choices we make and actions we engage in. Understanding this dynamic will help us make, use and govern technologies in ways that are conducive of the good life. Without understanding this dynamic, we seem to be lost.
practices are made intelligible through stories, through narrative.It is in the narrative mode that we explain our actions-with-technologies; that their “agency” is revealed. It is in the narrative mode that technical practices gain significance; that riding a bicycle becomes a social or political statement; that operating a military drone in a warzone becomes conducive or obstructive of certain virtues, of courage or friendship; and that smart architectures afford us a sense of freedom or domination. And, it is in narratives that we find the clearest “reflection” of technical practices; the topos where we can read how technologies mediate our actions. The major idea of his book is that narrative holds the key to our understanding of technical practices; both in explicating how narrative structures constitute a horizon of our understanding of the role of technical things in practices, as well as in showing how technical things mediate the narrative structures that govern our understanding of practices. In other words, this book depicts a dialectic between our understanding
of technical practices and the explanation
of these practices through narrative structures.
Going beyond both these strands of theory and drawing on narrative theory, this book puts a new and far-reaching thesis forward: that technologies, similar to texts, novels, and movies, “tell stories” by configuring characters and events in meaningful syntheses. As with most philosophical theses, this is one that reflects the current of its time. Why does it seem that technologies increasingly do not only do things to us, but with us, notably in the form of discourse? In line with Andrew Pickering’s striking observation (2010, p. 7), we have surpassed the age of technologies such as the bridge—that “just stand there”—and entered the age of the “adaptive machines”, with a “disturbing life-like quality”. Around us are myriad systems and devices that watch us, hear us, and engage with us; from smartphones to self-driving cars. Technologies are increasingly engaging with us in active ways, sensing our behaviours, our emotions, and even our thoughts, and responding to them through processes of internal configuration. Moreover, they do so in ways that are often very textual and expressive; using natural language and other modes of communication conducive to human interpretation. At the same time, they remain at a certain distance from us and retain or even expand aspects of technical practices that are impenetrable; where the stories they co-act with us do not “add up” or leave us with a sense of estrangement.
In our endeavour to use narrative theory in constructing an account of technological mediation, we draw extensively from the work of Paul Ricoeur. Ricoeur has been one of the most influential philosophers in the last century working on critical hermeneutics, and his oeuvre spans a wide range of themes; from linguistic analysis, to ethics, to political theory. He also developed one of the most comprehensive and philosophically informed narrative theories, which is the main reason why we will take up his work in developing our thesis concerning the active narrating role of technology. We will also use Ricoeur to think about the relation between technology and society. We thus take up Kaplan’s recommendation that Ricoeur’s work has much to offer to philosophers of technology but move beyond this by showing how the link can be made. In addition, we take inspiration from, and engage with, another body of theory that has its roots in Aristotelian philosophy: virtue ethics. This is not only an increasingly popular normative theory in contemporary philosophy of technology but offers much in combination with a narrative theory of technology in the form we propose. We simultaneously position our arguments within philosophy of technology, engaging with mediation theory as developed by Ihde and Verbeek, who have successfully initiated an influential but not unproblematic way to conceptualize the non-instrumental role of technology. Finally, we engage in an ongoing dialogue throughout this book with the new field of “digital hermeneutics”, which investigates how human interpretation extends beyond the mind into the realm of digital machines; which have their own interpretative capacities
(Romele 2019; Romele and Terrone 2018).
For instance, people engage in lively online discussions about the way in which augmented reality glasses change their wearer; whether they might turn someone from a law-abiding citizen into a “glasshole” (Kudina and Verbeek 2018).
this notion of configuration is analogous to the way in which a narrative that we engage with in a text configures our understanding of the world. That is, a text has a particular structure in which events and characters are organised, which generates a sense of time and puts what is narrated at a certain distance from the “world of action” of the characters. For instance, through reading Kafka’s novels, a reader’s understanding of the social world and the role of bureaucracy is configured, refiguring everyday actions into a new mode of being with a distinct temporal and spatial structure. The text has changed the reader’s understanding of simple actions such as checking in and out of her office, as well as filing requests for information with the authorities; which appear to her with an increasing sense of impersonality and distance. Similarly, using a technology such as the Strava app that tracks a user’s running progress, route, and patterns, transforms the technical practice of “running” and reveals a new sense of temporality and spatiality to the user.
As such, the technical practice of driving a car might contain (or rather, “have”) a narrative structure but is not strictly speaking a story.
Commute vs. Rally vs. Racing
The second intention of this book is to link our account of technological mediation with an ethics of technology, in particular to avoid divorcing our discussions on the normativity of technical practice from the ongoing discourse in normative ethics. The need for a move from technical mediation to its ethical impacts is motivated by growing and widespread concerns about the way in which new technologies influence human morality. On the individual level, new technologies such as home assistants challenge our autonomy, persuading us to do certain things (e.g., to buy a new item on Amazon) or even think in certain ways (Frischmann and Selinger 2018, p. 3). On the inter-personal level, platforms that focus on relationship-building and dating heavily impact virtues of empathy and friendship (Frischmann and Selinger 2018, p. 158). On the institutional level, global public discourse is increasingly challenged by new structures of broadcasting and moderation; giving rise to the spread of misinformation (Frischmann and Selinger 2018, p. 279). These developments and many others indicate that the phenomenon of technological mediation prompts inquiries into the “moral” mediation of technologies (cf., Verbeek 2011). Hence, it is not enough to merely have an approach to understand the structure of technical practices, but this needs to be complemented by a corresponding way to evaluate the normative impacts of these practices. In setting up this approach, we will align our thinking with the newly emerging discourse on “virtue ethics of technology”, while taking our primary cues from MacIntyre and Ricoeur, focusing on the latter’s “Little Ethics”.
LLMs help us to figure out how to kill ourselves. Yikes
The “revival” of virtue ethics—understood as a renewed interest in Aristotelian ethics in particular—has produced a great amount of scholarly works in the past decades. However, virtue ethics has only recently been introduced in the writings on ethics of technology. Charles Ess (2009) is one of the first scholars who sketched the outlines of a virtue ethics of technology and others have used virtue ethics in their ethical reflections on technology (cf. Bolsin et al. 2005; Coeckelbergh 2012). After these first explorations, Vallor’s recent book Technology and the Virtues
(2016) can be regarded as the first systematic and comprehensive account of a virtue ethics of technology approach. Virtue ethics has been a welcome addition to ethics of technology, because it offers an alternative, fruitful response to tensions in utilitarian and duty-based approaches that are very dominant in the field. Additionally, as Vallor argues, virtue ethics does not offer straightforward solutions to complex ethical issues as many approaches try to do, but instead provides a strategy for “cultivating the type of moral character that can aid us in coping, and even flourishing” (Vallor 2016, p. 10) with and under the challenging conditions of contemporary emerging technologies, such as surveillance technologies and human enhancement technologies.
Even when we design our technical practices in such a way that they are conducive of the good life, they might still exert (unintended) harm on certain people. For this reason, technical practices need to be limited in certain respects; they need to be subjected to appropriate laws. Even though Verbeek is right in claiming that we should emphasise “how to shape the interrelatedness between humans and technologies” (Verbeek 2011, p. 164—emphasis added), we should not forget to also draw boundaries; not between humans and technologies but around technical practices. We will therefore, in line with Ricoeur, add a moment of obligation to our virtue ethics of technology that aims at the good, in the form of a “sieve of the norm” (Ricoeur 1992, p. 170). This means that we will conceptualise how technical practices should be subjected to norms (laws, codes, etc.) aimed at eliminating their capacity to do violence.
Turning again to Ricoeur’s work, notably his “Little Ethics” in Oneself As Another
(1992), we
Today, philosophy and ethics
of technologies is a burgeoning field of study. It has emerged from the far away, dark corners of dusty philosophy departments into the light of interdisciplinary research groups, “philosophy labs” and even commercial “ethics officers” for big Tech firms. This of course reflects the current of our time, especially in the wake of Covid19, in which each global problem at least in part seems attributable to technological innovation and its impacts.
- when reading Plato’s allegory of the cave our prefigured time involving ideas of human knowledge (before reading) changes by means of interaction with the text in the configured time (during reading) and is subsequently synthesised with our experience of the world in the refigured time (after reading). The reading of Plato’s allegory mediates and shapes our experience of the world because it leads us to consider our own experiences as analogous to the shadows cast in the cave in which we are supposed to be imprisoned as presented in the allegory. The three phases that constitute the movement of emplotment are defined as follows:Mimesis 1: the prefigurative phase. This phase consists of the understanding of the world of action
its semantics, its symbolic order and its temporality.Mimesis 2: the configurative phase. In this phase, characters and events are organised in a meaningful whole, a plot.Mimesis 3: the refigurative phase of reading. This concludes the narrative circle, of applying narrative to the prefigured world of action
.
It is the act of reading that accompanies the narrative’s configuration and actualises its capacity to be followed. To follow a story is to actualize it by reading it. And if emplotment can be described as an act of judgment and of the productive imagination, it is so insofar as this act is the joint work of the text
and reader, just as Aristotle said that sensation is the common work of sensing and what is sensed”. (Ricoeur 1983, p. 76—emphasis added)In other words, a reader is only able to imagine and judge the course of events in a narrative insofar as the text simultaneously offers the resources for following and actualising it.
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