3.2: Techno-Humanities. Critical Reflection in Technology
Reflection on technology cannot be the sole domain of the engineering sciences. The humanities play a vital role here: they allow us to ask how technology enriches social relations, enabling new ways of living and acting together. Research projects dedicated to new ways of thinking about technology – approaches that do not reduce it to a mere tool or a threat to the human condition, but treat it as a phenomenon shaping contemporary forms of sociality – are developed within the Laboratory for Techno-Humanities. The object of interest is technology understood as an environment of relations: a space in which new ways of being together, sharing experiences, and constructing communities emerge.
The Technics and Socialization project, conducted within the Laboratory, focuses on the mediation of knowledge about the world, identity, and social interactions by digital technologies. Every day, we function surrounded by screens: receiving hundreds of notifications, creating digital avatars, verifying our identities in banking systems, working, learning, and establishing relationships in the online space. The project raises questions about the extent to which technology has taken control of social life, and the extent to which its socialization opens new possibilities for coexistence, sharing, and cooperation. Simultaneously, it analyzes how the very concept of socialization changes its meaning under post-digital conditions.
Reflection on technology takes place within an international research environment focused on the problems of the contemporary social world. It addresses issues such as the future of work, transformations of subjectivity and digital identity, shifts in the concepts of “world” and “materialism,” as well as new forms of capitalism, energy, investment, brutalism, and cruelty emerging from the post-digital landscape.
An essential area of reflection is also the transformation of education in the context of developing new digital tools – from cloud-based learning to generative artificial intelligence. Research focuses on the analysis of the discourses of educational institutions and how they shape the attitudes of teachers and students toward technology.
Another research field is the impact of generative artificial intelligence on the concepts of authorship and interpretation. Questions are formulated regarding the relevance of “distributed authorship” concepts known from structuralist and post-structuralist thought, the beliefs of artists creating with AI, and whether texts generated by artificial intelligence can be subjected to interpretation in the traditional sense.
A Helmsman Not Only at Sea
The word “cybernetics” is derived from the Greek kybernētēs and means “helmsman.” In antiquity, the helmsman was a master of constant course correction, navigating skillfully despite changing circumstances. In this sense, Odysseus – seeking his way home – was a kybernētēs. Constant course correction is, in fact, the logic of the feedback loop, an insight recognized by Norbert Wiener, who later made it the foundation of modern cybernetics. This discipline steers through information and its correction. This makes the task Odysseus receives from Tiresias in the Odyssey all the more intriguing: he is to carry his oar so far inland that people who do not know the sea mistake the oar for an agricultural tool. For us, this story illustrates not only the fate of cybernetics but also that of technology itself. When uprooted from its original context, technology changes its meaning. Cybernetics was born from the art of seafaring, but today the logic of control and feedback loops drives algorithms, networks, and artificial intelligence; it is the foundation of the many digital technologies that “steer” the contemporary world.
↑ Poster for the sixth conference organized as part of the “Technology and Socialization” project, dedicated to the question of the loss of the world and the possibility of its recovery.
↓ William Heath, March of Intellect, c. 1828 – a vision of a future full of inventions, presented as a satire on the social fears and hopes of the industrial era (source: Wikimedia Commons)