In previous entries in Soapbox, on webcams and cyberbabies, the authors reflected on the challenges that technologies pose to contemporary humans in their attempts to achieve good – decent and/or happy – lives in common, for themselves and others. The proposed ways to face those challenges were tied to education. A somehow shared idea was that individuals should be, first, raised in specific ideas, values, and practices, such as civility, respect for others, etc., and, second, that they should be educated for thinking and approaching technologies in certain ways (overcoming the alternative images of technologies as determining forces or neutral tools, realizing their emancipatory potentials and avoiding their risks, and so on).
In a comment on the entry on cyberbabies, Clark Miller pointed out that ‘society has a choice between adapting people to technologies and adapting technologies to people. Right now, we've decided to go with the former’. We can think of education as a form of adaptation to technologies – there are certainly others, usually harder ones – but I don’t want to focus on this. I want rather to interpret this quote as a complementary response to the question of how to address the challenges that the relationships between humans and technologies pose to contemporary societies.
If we use essayist José Ortega y Gasset’s characterization of life as the dramatic relation between a human being and her circumstances, and take into account the increasing relevance of technology in the configuration of those circumstances across the globe, one could say that the existence of many humans is becoming a ‘technolife’. A first consequence of this is that nurturing certain ways of living requires not just attending to human agents (in their relations among themselves and with technologies), but also to technological ones (in themselves and in their connection with humans). In this sense, design (of devices, machines, etc. but also of buildings, urban settings, and so on) could be thought as a correlate of education. Concretely, taking as a model the double task of education as sketched above, we can think of ‘good’ design, first, as trying to embody certain ideas, values, and operations in technologies (to achieve reliability, efficiency, etc.), and, second, as trying to adapt these technologies to users, sometimes to favor certain use(r)s. Obviously, many aspects of human development can be achieved independently of humans’ relations with technologies, and technologies can be developed without referring to their connections with humans–for instance, in the construction and functioning of their internal mechanisms. Nevertheless, crucial features of the reflection and constitution of contemporary technolives have to do with the intersections of human and technological development. In these intersections, education and design could be thought or guided according to heuristics based on the notion and reality of ‘forms of life,’ which embrace humans and technologies as their coevolving constituents. For example, raising certain ‘kinds’ of people may depend on constructing certain ‘kinds’ of technologies – from interactive education tools to buildings surveillance – and, reciprocally, creating certain technologies requires certain ‘kinds’ of people-like ‘virtuous’ designers and users. The resulting ways of life of individuals and groups depend as much on technologies’ design as on education.
Education and design appear as two relevant venues for nurturing certain forms of life, but they are only two contributors among others to culture and life formation, whose outcomes ultimately exceed control or planning. Great expectations posed on them have become in many cases frustrated modern hopes. Nevertheless, work and care for our forms of life are unavoidable tasks – as they always were – and unavoidably sociotechnical in their agents, processes, and objects, perhaps more clearly so now than ever before. To the extent that contemporary societies realize the challenges of life today (for instance, those emerging around webcams or cyberbabies) traditional approaches to activities such as design and education may have to be reconsidered. Exploring the profile and interconnections of humans and technologies within – or from the viewpoint of – certain forms of life may be a small step in that task.
About the Author: Antonio Calleja-Lopez is a visiting graduate researcher at CNS-ASU from the University of Seville, Spain.
