Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Medienwissenschaft

The aim of this talk is to present a general scheme of a chapter of my PhD thesis in writing. It will start by introducing some key concepts on which the thesis is based: it will be an attempt to bring together philosophy of technology and media theory towards a philosophy understood as mediology, finalized at the study of media, mediation, and mediality; to do this, I will focus on the interface – understood both as a cultural technique and as a specific material place – as a privileged case study.
After having provided a general definition of interfaces – which will characterize them as media that generate mediation simply by posing and opening to the medial condition – it will be explained why visual interfaces in particular should be taken into account.
After showing the role of visual interfaces in capturing and directing attention and therefore the predisposition to action of the human component of the system, the discussion will move on to the real topic of the chapter. This topic will consist of trying to answer three questions: (i) What is the “purpose”, from the point of view of the machine, of conditioning the action of the human component? (ii) What causes the human being to let him or her be conditioned without resistance? (iii) How can one intervene on the interfaces to recover a conscious interaction with them – if possible?
The answers to these questions – in addition to being framed within the aforementioned concepts of media, mediation, and mediality – will be found by recovering some key issues of cybernetics, such as system, feedback, circular causality, which will become the basis of a theory of (human and non-human) action for the digital age.
Finally, it will be necessary to ask (and this question will remain open to discussion) what strategy can be adopted to design interfaces that encourage interaction over control, but without sacrificing usability.