Faust, Freud, machine: encounters and performance

Excerpt

As the digital world is increasingly taking hold of our lives, and ‘more and more of the value in our lives migrates online’, we may be shutting many of the windows of freedom which enable us to seek reconciliation with the world around us, especially freedom from ‘exploitation by others’ and external forces, as noted by the Editorial in the Observer (2013). Even when digital technology opens new windows of ‘freedom’ such as ‘social networking’, it can use the same windows as instruments of control and unfreedom, as illustrated by the surveillance software, Riot, which can track ‘people’s movements and predicting future behaviour by mining data from social networking websites’ (Gallagher 2013). Given the vulnerability and the clouded nature of the digital migration, it may not be long before any of the ‘residual digital euphoria’ is replaced by ‘growing ethical and privacy unease’, especially when we are not certain ‘what it means to be secure in an online realm’. It could be surmised that just as Taylorism seduced the industrial societies to endure the migration of workers’ knowledge and skills more and more to the machine, it seems that digitally inclined policy makers, governments, IT experts, and corporations are wishing and propelling us not only to become adapted to the digital world, but also to fit ourselves into the straight jacket of the data-driven society. The danger of this digital migration is that it may lead not only to the abstraction of the human condition and its contexts, but also to the abstraction of self and identity itself. This abstraction could be a short step towards a distributed digital self, increasingly becoming digitally engaged but socially and emotionally disengaged from contextual living environments. Could it be that this seeming transition from social to digital engagement is being propagated as a strategic proposition by governments and public organisations in further transforming public services, education, health, welfare, and employment to the digital realm, as if these socially situated services were another form of data management. The consequence of this digitally oriented policy is likely to be the weakening of human presence in the transformative cycle of interaction, mediation, and interlocution, which facilitates the interpretation, dissemination, and communication of contextually relevant and personally and socially responsive services, one of the central ethos of these human services. This weakening of the human presence, or we may call it ‘human window’, is a step towards closing doors of freedom, a freedom to engage with, influence, and shape public services. It is important to recognise that the design of digital systems, however, technically competent these system may be invariably comes with vulnerabilities, defaults, and brittleness, and their malfunctioning cannot be anticipated. We should, however, take the social and ethical responsibility to at least ‘change the terms of the debate’ on the design, evaluation, and use of digital technologies within diverse user contexts. A system, even a technically competent digital system, is as effective as its weakest component, and any complex technology–mediated system should leave at least some windows open for dealing with uncertain, unforeseen, and unanticipated situations. …