On human and technological boundaries
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 22693142 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Hector Amaya (University of Southern California), H Carlos Andrés Amaya (University of Southern California, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2023 |
| Volume | 73 |
| Issue | 6 |
| Pages | 621-623 |
| Publication date | 2023-12-14 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Communication (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-9916 • E-ISSN: 1460-2466 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1093/joc/jqad034 |
| OpenAlex | W4389842103 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 4 |
In the Spring of 2023, a group of academics that included me and other colleagues in communication studies were having lunch at the University of Southern California.We were welcoming a Chinese colleague visiting from Germany and our group included a couple of anthropologists and a sociologist.The conversation veered toward complex cases of digital life and identity, a subject matter quite common in the discipline of communication studies.One of the anthropologists noted that she preferred to talk to "actual people" rather than interact only with digital forms of communication, performance, and expression.While the table agreed in principle, a brief debate ensued as to what the actual person is.Are our digital selves not our actual selves?Are our digital avatars not our actual bodies?What is the actual person?This last question is one of the oldest in philosophy and the human sciences.It is often associated with ontology, the part of philosophy that explores being, but it does not always present itself in the form of a query about ontology.Sometimes it is only alluded to in discussions about the mind, experience, representation, technology, selfhood, embodiment, identity, and/or personal responsibility.The ontological is the clearest when these discussions trouble the issue of human boundaries.Yet, whether addressed directly or indirectly, the issue of the actual person, human ontology, has moved philosophy and the human sciences forward, pitting some disciplines against others, metaphysics against psychology, legal theory against literary theory, and sociology against economics.I approach these four excellent books about the digital, the social, and the individual inspired by these questions and debates.Most work on the digital is always already about the entwinements that exist between the digital and the actual person, the real, the analog, and/or the body, and these books are no exception.These scholars, Tonia Sutherland, Catherine Knight Steele, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, and Meredith Broussard are clearly wrestling with the real in the age of digitization and, for this reason, these works can be read as commentaries on human and digital onticity.I use the terms ontic and onticity to refer to the way life and experience happen to particular individuals, particular beings.I am not suggesting that these works address being in general (the task of ontology).What I argue is that these authors help us understand contemporary modes of existence, contemporary onticity, made evident by the ambiguous boundary between the human and the digital.The authors' emphasis on the ontic is due in part to the importance of positionality in their theoretical and methodological engagements.
Business · Economic geography · Geography · Space Science and Extraterrestrial Life
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |