Technology & media commonly represent both the subject-object relation (the difference between persons & things) & the history-nature relation (the difference between humanity & the non-human). By this almost self-evident relationality (production-consumption) they are better suited than many other topics for discussing the philosophical sense of the 'idea', which is a structure that makes interdependent what is subjective & objective. To counterbalance the typical one-sided objectivist concern for technology & media, we might consider the features of subjectivity that come into play with any actual existence of them, namely in their use by beings who are ...
Explore these diagrams of those aspects for their relevance to technology & media.
theorist | period lived | subject (specialization) | object (investigation) | major work |
---|---|---|---|---|
Gilbert Simondon | 1924-1989 | philosopher | technology | 1958. On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects. |
Regis Debray | 1940- | journalist | media | 1994. Media Manifestos: Technological Transmission of Cultural Forms. |
Niklas Luhmann | 1927-1998 | sociologist | systems | 1995. Art as Social System. |
Alfred North Whitehead | 1861-1947 | mathematician | process | 1929. Process & Reality. |
Andre Leroi-Gourhan | 1911-1986 | archaeologist | artifactuality | 1964. Gesture & Speech. |
Bernard Stiegler | 1952- | philosopher | mnemotechnics | 2001. Technics & Time 3. |
Rene Thom | 1923-2002 | mathematician | morphogenesis | 1972. Structural Stability & Morphogenesis. |
Freidrich Kittler | 1943-2011 | literary scholar | prostheticity | 1986. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. |
Donella Meadows | 1941-2001 | environmental scientist | feedback | 2007. Thinking in Systems. |
Lewis Mumford | 1995-1990 | historian | mechanization | 1934. Technics & Civilization. |
Roland Barthes | 1915-1980 | linguist | semiosis | 1964. Elements of Semiology. |
Umberto Eco | 1932-2016 | literary critic | idiolects | 1984. Semiotics & the Philosophy of Language. |
Gregory Bateson | 1904-1980 | anthropologist | cybernetics | 1972. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. |
Andrew Feenburg | 1943- | critical theorist | instrumentalization | 1999. Questioning Technology. |
Richard Doyle | NA | artificial life scholar | wetware | 2003. Wetwares: Experiments Postvital Living. |
Lev Manovich | 1960- | CS scholar | hybridity | 2013. Software Takes Command. |
Lawrence Lessig | 1961- | software scholar | laws | 2006. Code 2.0. |