CS213 Lecture Notes - Lecture 13: Nazi Salute, Snowpiercer
Assemblage and Articulation - Articulation
Complex Emergent Phenomenon
● Points to ways in which human behaviour/practices take shape
● Example of ball game on computer (audience hold up red side for barrier to go down,
green to go up)
● Idea that if no hierarchy existed at all - what would happen? → formed subconscious
consensus
● Somewhat technological determinist
● However describes it as collective conscious at end (in brain and non-material)
● He sees audience as made up of individuals
● Game was heterogeneous - no top down management, but doesn’t have to be libertarian
ideology to explain what was happening
● Highlights that things can spontaneously be emerged
● Made up of actor network theory rather than individuals pursuing their own wills
● Looking at it as one consciousness actually undermines the heterogeneity
● Shows way in which organizations can be self organizing rather than autocratically
managed from above
● Assemblages function in this way - self organizing, joining/connecting elements within an
assemblage
So far…
● Technology is as much about ways of doing things as it is about ‘things’ that do things
● Technology is a relational field of forces/associations
● The ‘things’ we associate with technology come into existence within and are determined
by those relations
● Technologies are open, dynamic systems - we cannot attribute causality to particular
things
○ New connections can form, old connections can be abandoned
○ Causality determined by multiple elements
● Agency is distributed - phenomena emerge not due to the interaction of things but as the
outcome of the inter-relations between elements, both material and immaterial
(symbolic)
○ Idea of actor-network theory
Technical Objects
● Never come into being as discrete entities
● They are always developed in relation to other technologies (both real and imagined)
● They are experienced as things through social processes that separate them out, mark
their boundaries, and attribute their ‘effects’ in relation to other technologies
Surveillance Example
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
Points to ways in which human behaviour/practices take shape. Example of ball game on computer (audience hold up red side for barrier to go down, green to go up) However describes it as collective conscious at end (in brain and non-material) He sees audience as made up of individuals. Game was heterogeneous - no top down management, but doesn"t have to be libertarian ideology to explain what was happening. Highlights that things can spontaneously be emerged. Made up of actor network theory rather than individuals pursuing their own wills. Looking at it as one consciousness actually undermines the heterogeneity. Shows way in which organizations can be self organizing rather than autocratically managed from above. Assemblages function in this way - self organizing, joining/connecting elements within an assemblage. Technology is as much about ways of doing things as it is about things" that do things. Technology is a relational field of forces/associations.
