“You Mean My Whole Fallacy Is Wrong”

Abstract

This essay offers both a genealogy of the concept of technological determinism and a metacritique of the ways academic accusations of fallaciousness risk stopping difficult but essential kinds of inquiry. To call someone a technological determinist is to claim all the moral force on your side without answering the question of what we are to do with these devices that infest our lives.

Understanding Identity and Platform Cultures

“…While such an approach opens up avenues to understand technologies ability to shape society at a macro level, McLuhan's focus on the importance of the medium over the message fractures and distances the message that is being conveyed from the medium through which it is being conveyed (Peters, 2017), and has led to sweeping assumptions about how technology works with our identities. For example, the assumptions around 'digital natives'.…”

“…Such broad approaches often do not allow for a consideration of novelty, negotiation, compromise, or resistanceof both the medium and the messages, which can obscure the complexities of the ways technologies work in our lives, or that humans can have novel and individual experiences with technology beyond suggested and codified uses alone (Peters 2017). These discussions about how users make sense of technology, and indeed the ability to resist or comply with the power of media are rife in media studies writ large where theories have been built and debated over the last century.…”

Animating Relations: Digitally Mediated Intimacies between the Living and the Dead

“…Turkle 1995;Castells 1996;Hayles 1999;Weinberger 2007). Animation underscores the ways in which digital media build on and extend analog technologies, pointing to a generative reciprocity between analog and digital forms (Bolter and Grusin 1999;Gitelman 2006;Galloway, Thacker, and Wark 2013;Peters 2017). Digital animations such as avatars remediate not only analog artistic genres such as drawings of cartoons and anime characters but also practices such as puppetry, which vivify nonhuman objects (Manning 2009;Silvio 2010;Boellstorff 2015).…”

TikTok as Television

“…Investigating flow in this sense requires attention to the forms of causality inherent in the media product, the technology itself, and the uses of the technology. We see this as central to understanding a new platform, even if it risks the fallacious accusation of technological determinism, as the flow we encounter is very much a mixture of an inhuman apparatus and human media plans (Peters, 2017). The focus on technologies in media studies today enlivens discussion, just as it did for cultural studies in Williams’ context.…”