Technology, narrative, and performance in the social theatre

摘要

What does a process approach imply for thinking about digital technologies? This talk discusses what the notions of narrative, roles, and direction can do for understanding and evaluating technology. Using a number of metaphors borrowed from domains such as literature and theatre, I try to conceptualize what technology, in particular digital technologies, do to our lives in terms of their impact on narrative-temporal structures and embodied-social performances. I give examples such as smartphones, social robots, and social media to show how technologies write, direct, and organize the narrative and temporal structure and meanings of our social lives and existence. In response to postphenomenology, I emphasize embodiment and acknowledge the agency of technology, but stress that currently that approach lacks a good conceptualization of the social and temporal dimension of what technology does and misses the existential importance of narrativity. Moreover, I argue that Latour’s approach is helpful here but needs to be further developed by critically reflecting on, and further unpacking, the metaphors it uses. I also move away from postmodern approaches to narrativity in the humanities that take text as the main metaphor and miss the embodied and performative aspects of technological practices. For this purpose I highlight the theatre metaphor in Ricœur’s narrativity theory and use that metaphor to argue for moving towards a more embodied-performative understanding. This opens the way to a more narrative and performance-oriented hermeneutics and (post)phenomenology of technology.