The<i>Kultur</i>of Cultural Techniques

Winthrop‐Young, Geoffrey

doi:10.1215/17432197-2795741

Cited by 18 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…One of the few antidotes to such a dynamic, is the constant emphasis on personal integrity and ethical conduct (Zimbardo, 2011). Here the notion of informed consent and what it means that the other individual has understood the communication is crucial (Bryman, 2016;Winthrop-Young 2014). Without such an emphasis on the axiological dimension that underpins our scientific culture, "'good' research conduct [may be] reconceptualised along with what is expedient to account, instead of its significance" (Brauer et al, 2019: 75).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Atavism, Layering and Subversion: Understanding Great Social Challenges of Today Through the Lens of Cultural Contingents

Dymitrow¹

2019

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Great social challenges of today no longer come one by one. What makes them great is their ever-greater entanglement in one other and across multiple levels, including landscapes, regimes and niches. To this background, a major challenge facing many countries today is how to successfully address issues of interlocking problems of unsustainability caused by cultural contingents. We argue that while the social problems of today have gone wicked, we still imagine them as if they were tame. Tame approaches to wicked problems, in turn, are likely to spawn "wicked solutions", i.e. purported counteractions that are so conceptually unsuitable for the problem at hand that they can even overwhelm the wickedness of the wicked problem. This makes it so much more difficult to resolve. In this paper, we present three conspicuous examples in this dimension: cultural atavism, artificial layering and pathological subversion. We argue that acknowledging wicked solutions as different from wicked problems is a first step to mitigate the daunting effects that may arise when the two intertwine.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Atavism, Layering and Subversion: Understanding Great Social Challenges of Today Through the Lens of Cultural Contingents

Dymitrow¹

2019

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“…This is the point where the approach of cultural techniques not only bears similarities with many traditional takes on posthumanism but also differs from them. Winthrop-Young (2014, p. 386) points out that posthumanism argues for the hybridization of the human through and with technology, but for cultural techniques, the human never existed without the non-human.…”

Section: Cultural Techniques or Ethics As Method Methods As Ethicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“The Computer Said So”: On the Ethics, Effectiveness, and Cultural Techniques of Predictive Policing

Karppi

2018

Social Media + Society

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In this paper, I use The New York Times’ debate titled, “Can predictive policing be ethical and effective?” to examine what are seen as the key operations of predictive policing and what impacts they might have in our current culture and society. The debate is substantially focused on the ethics and effectiveness of the computational aspects of predictive policing including the use of data and algorithms to predict individual behaviour or to identify hot spots where crimes might happen. The debate illustrates both the benefits and the problems of using these techniques, and makes a strong stance in favor of human control and governance over predictive policing. Cultural techniques in the paper is used as a framework to discuss human agency and further elaborate how predictive policing is based on operations which have ethical, epistemological, and social consequences.

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“…The agency behind these ontic operations is muddled, however, constituting chains where links are both machinic and human. So, while cultural techniques often tend to emphasize basic “intellectual skills,” such as reading, writing, and counting—often referred to as elementare Kultur-techniken (elementary cultural techniques)—corporeal (walking and cooking [see Winthrop-Young, 2014]), and sociopsychological practices (such as describing, delineating, assessing, and hierarching), also precede the media-theoretical concepts they generate. By that we want to emphasize how ontic operations are not fixed—the underlying cultural technique can be redesigned, or even just reinterpreted, altering the repertoire of (potential) ontic operations and the praxis and statuses emerging from it.…”

Section: The Cultural Techniques and Ontic Operations Of The Retrocommentioning

confidence: 99%

The archive and the scene: On the cultural techniques of retrocomputing databases

Rahm‐Skågeby

Carlsson

2021

New Media & Society

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Several digital spaces are now archiving artifacts from the first 1980s home computer boom. These spaces are not only storages but also social venues and “memory banks,” and thereby depend on several concurrent practices: software and hardware developed to read, run, and preserve computer code; archiving of old software, magazines, and personal stories; contemporary conferences dedicated to retrocomputing; and making artifacts, which used to be private, publicly available. The article argues that retrocomputing can be seen as a foreshadowing in terms of managing collective digital archives, memories, and relationships to digital material. Taking the Commodore 64 Scene Database as a case, this article (1) engages with both users and cultural techniques in order to (2) theorize collective digital archives as “performative in-betweens” and (3) discuss how retrocomputing may become a default mode for people seeking access to their digital pasts in a time when planned obsolescence is rampant.

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TheKulturof Cultural Techniques

Abstract: This article offers an introduction to the German concept of Kulturtechniken (cultural techniques), with a special focus on the term's multilayered semantic career, as well as on the way old notions of Kultur are at play in the concept.

Cited by 18 publications

References 13 publications

Atavism, Layering and Subversion: Understanding Great Social Challenges of Today Through the Lens of Cultural Contingents

Atavism, Layering and Subversion: Understanding Great Social Challenges of Today Through the Lens of Cultural Contingents

“The Computer Said So”: On the Ethics, Effectiveness, and Cultural Techniques of Predictive Policing

The archive and the scene: On the cultural techniques of retrocomputing databases

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