Perfomance does not mean immateriality

It is possible to discuss how IT and Technology, in a broad sense, are reflected differently across social organizations within various contradictions and paradoxes. In my book "Information Technology in Urban Places" I summarises the philosophical views of M. Arnold from his text "On the Phenomenology of Technology: the "Janus-faces" of mobile phones", published in Information and Organization: 231-256, 2003.

Basically Arnold mentions five classifications which are: ‘substantive’, ‘determinist’, ‘social construction’, ‘network’ approaches, and the others are ‘mixed’ contributions, regarding how technology and society influence each other. A ‘determinist’ perspective on technology is described by Arnold (2003: 237), suggesting that specific technologies or clusters of technologies determine social conditions and drive specific social changes through historical eras. Different from the other perspectives, this comprehends approaches that link particular technologies to particular social outcomes. On face value, this perspective excludes contradictions in terms of those outcomes, since technology is regarded as independent from social context. Arnold makes clear, however, that it happens because this perspective derives from the modernist usage in the field of knowledge studies (epistemology), which makes three binary divisions: the separation of time and space (privileging time), subject and object (privileging subject), and cause and effect (privileging cause). This strategy enables technology to be separated analytically from society in symmetry with the separation of cause and effect. Analysing how information is found to be related to technology in this point of view, Arnold comments:

“Having made this crucial move to separate society from technology, and to purify the essence of each, (a move so much engrained in our traditions that it is scarcely visible), it becomes possible to stratify by aligning technology with causality and society with effect, producing McLuhan’s Global Village, Bell’s Information Society, Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man, Toffler’s Third Wave, Mitchell’s City of Bits, Poster’s Second Media Age, Gates’ Frictionless Economy, and so on.” (Arnold 2003: 238)

On the other hand, the approach termed the "Social Construction of Technology" is described by Arnold as one that sees society and its imperatives as being prior to the technologies that emerge from them. Like the determinist approach, social construction operates within the modernist framework, and uses the same determinist logic, reliant upon linking linear chains, from social cause to technical landscape. It also cleaves and separates the technical from the social, in ways that are arbitrary and analytically questionable, but are required if the social is to be privileged. After having made this arbitrary distinction, social and technical are connected, with the latter being depicted as a consequence of the former.

Yet other different approaches use networked analogies. For these, technology is both a cause and an effect, and the social is both a cause and an effect as well. This means that each is both emergent and structuring. This point of view is achieved by collapsing the modernist distinction between the two, and referring instead to the performance of an actor. ‘Performance’ may be thus a name to be carefully taken to mean the cluster of actions that constitute the usage, and emerge in the course of the use, when the whole ramified and a very extensive assemblage of heterogeneous beings call upon one another to cooperate, and do so - totally different from what ours students understand about the term. The ontology of any given actor, its origin and meaning, is a matter of its relationship in any given network, and the ontology of the network as a whole is also a matter of its internal and external relations. The relational linkage of the system and the way those links generate hybrid forms linking humans, objects, situations, is the fundamental unit of analysis. Concentrating on uncategorized forms of interconnection and relation, on undifferentiated imbroglios of politics, physics, machinery, bureaucracy etc., all situated within the same frame of analysis, the networked approaches do not foreclose the coexistence of contrary implications or paradoxical observations. Therefore, multiple, though overlapping, ontologies coexist, and even contrary implications are possible. However, the application of such analysis is very hard and most of times it conduces to mistakes that weaken a vision in a reseearch.

Other contributions that mix information and technology are studied by D. Ihde Ihde, in his paper from 1990, "Technology and the Lifeworld: From garden to earth." (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Retrieved January 18, 2006). He refers to technological mediation in phenomenological terms, drawing particular attention to the necessary co-occurrence of amplification and reduction. That means, an increased capacity to engage with the world in a particular way is accompanied by a reduced capacity to engage with it in other ways - for example, the amplified view provided through a microscope closes off the view of the room. A. Borgmann Borgmann, in his book "Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life: a Philosophical Inquiry" (Chicago, University of Chicago Press) also exemplify an approach in which technological devices are seen as a mean to attenuate human engagement with the world, assuming more and more functionality until the point is reached at which social engagement becomes unnecessary.

Finalizing , Arnold argues that Heidegger’s model of a ‘lifeworld enframed by technology’, together with a networked logic that looks to an ontology of hybrids offers a better way forward for the investigation of technology. Arnold does not mention any special feature in his classification relating to IT and space, but it is possible to glimpse that the polarity between technology and society highlighted by him contains some ideas about how space is considered in each approach. For instance, by mentioning Heidegger’s thought, he is implicitly assuming all the spatial implications of the Heideggerian concept of being-in-the-world. expressed as an action, as reflected by the word composed by the hyphenization, as an ontological unity acting in its place, the world. ‘Networked actors’ approaches (Latour and Woolgar 1979; Latour 1987), however, go even further, emphasizing place as action and revealing action as decisive to give meaning to linked actors, which means that all the categories rely on the situation whose links establish their connection. Space and place are, on this view, categories of concepts that are too narrow, whether thought of in terms of stable geometrical properties, referencing an immutable position in the world. This provides, at first sight, an idea of immateriality conformed by actions in space, that is, it will be seen, wrong. Such apparent immateriality, as a result of this analytical treatment, is problematic in terms of the objectives of the research of my book, and closer examples of a spatial analysis of IT could be useful when it comes to clarifying what the concept of space and place come to mean inside ‘networked actors’ approaches, and this will be a serious concern that I discussed in my book.