Johannes Grenzfurthner will give a talk at SIGINT 2010: “Reach Out and Touch Face: A rant about failing”.
Science and Technology Studies (especially Langdon Winner and Bruno Latour) have convincingly demonstrated that the widespread inability to understand technological artifacts as fabricated entities, as social and cultural phenomena, derives from the fact that in retrospect only those technologies that prove functional for a culture and can be integrated into everyday life are “left over.” However, the perception of what is functional, successful and useful is itself the product of social and cultural, and last but not least political and economic processes. Selection processes and abandoned products (developmental derailments, sobering intermediary results, useless prototypes) are not discussed.
Well. What can we do?
We can fail.
Beautifully.
May 23, 2010; at SIGINT, KOMED, Mediapark Cologne, 10 PM.