Panel Statement
Panel: Without Sin: Taboo and Freedom within Digital Media
Technological innovation is often characterised as producing a population composed of “tempted” bodies, corrupted desires or utopian potential distorted by unlimited possibility, and juxtaposed to a now-foregone simpler era and existence. Such a moral economy of human activity is reflected in the “moral panics” conjured around digital technologies and the deleterious effects upon users attributed to them. This paper seeks to explore the relation between subjective experience (consciousness) and the contemporary environment, in particular, the dissemination of digital technology within mobile devices, such as laptops, tablets and “smartphones”. Recent theoretical positions, such as “neuroanthropology,” delineating the “encultured brain”, appear suited to engaging digital technologies and their putative consequences: however, the sociological study of technology and “tools” also provides a platform for such an analysis. This paper attempts to identify the affinities and oppositions between these two discourses and their respective examinations of mobile digital devices through an analysis of the “extension” of experience (McLuhan) and the modification of our understanding of its neurological underpinning. It does so by proposing that experience be grasped as a series of interactions best judged as affective phenomena, rather than events with moral consequences. “Consciousness” is described as a phenomenon that is enacted or inhabited through a dialogue with the wider environment and, as such, is modified through the increasing preponderance of mobile digital technology and the transformation of temporal, spatial and inter-subjective relations that this affords. Consequently the moral economy encompassing right/wrong, truth/falsity, sacred/profane is viewed as antiquated and inappropriate in a world where technological freedoms have transformed the possibilities of subjective experience and its representation as identity or identities through web-based media or social media.
- Dr. Gordon Hush is a sociologist who now heads the Product Design department of The Glasgow School of Art, UK. He tends to focus upon the relationship between people and things and tries to explain this in terms of experience(s) since this avoids having to talk about human nature. His PhD was supposed to be about people using shopping centres but ended up taking social theory to task for its reliance upon economistic assumptions and their role in shaping human activity. He is currently interested in finding out how design practice can contribute to and be materialized in and through local activities, experiences and artifacts and so serve as a counter to globalizing forces and their “outsourcing” of jobs, money and opportunity. To this end he is currently setting up a new Masters programme at The Glasgow School of Art in Design & Citizenship.
Full text (PDF) p. 1254-1259