Game Culture 02: Assemblage, Actors, and Politics

In today's lecture we had a large discussion about the doing and sayings of the social determinists and the technological determinists, in the shape of Langdon Winner and Bruno Latour respectively. A crucial thing about discussing games in the context of these jolly fellows, is to view them as technologies, alongside fridges, cars and doors. It all comes down to that computer games are a part of our culture, and within our culture, the social is deeply interwoven with technology. How the social relates to technology however, is a larger discussion.

Langdon Winner:
Winner states that machines, structures and systems (technologies) can embody specific forms of power and authority, and that technical things have political qualities.

"In controversies about technology and society, there is no idea more provocative than the notion that technical things have political qualities. At issue is the claim that the machines, structures, and systems of modern material culture can be accurately judged not only for their contributions of  efficiency and productivity, not merely for their positive and negative environmental side effects, but also for the ways in which they can embody specific forms of power and authority. Since ideas of this kind have a persistent and  troubling presence in discussions about the meaning of technology, they deserve explicit attention."

In his theory, 2 models of technology can be made:

1. Ordering technology (The flexible version), where technology controls us and decides how we go about with our daily lives. I.e. how we get to work (by car or subway)
2. Inherent technology, where a certain hierarchy is needed in order to make everything work. I.e. a bomb need a hierarchy of "the right people" to have the detonator. Otherwise everyone might have a detonator and be able to push the red button.

Winner is a representative of the movement of technological determinism. According to him, we are enforced by technology to do something, dependent on how that technology is designed. Technology is going forward, with little care about us as humans. The force of history makes us discover new technology, but our role in the advancement of technology is small; it's advancement is inevitable. Thus, the technologies we have now, is the best technology that we can get at the present time.

A large critique of this view is that there is a lot of really bad technology, that is not the best that we can get. There is also a lot of very good technology, that never gets the opportunity to break through.

Bruno Latour:
Latour sees technology as human delegation. Non-humans replaces us in some kind of labor, to be our extended minds and limbs. He talks a lot about the missing masses that is tying us all together. The missing mass, he claims, is technology. It is a human condition, that helps us create the world alongside us. And we are not just humans. We take on the role of the technological artifact as well, and reinscribe the technological back into the social (We become the safety belt for our kids, when it is faulty). Humans and non-human actors are equally shaping history.

A critique of social determinism can be exemplified by the vast amount of new mobile phones with new improvements and new features every year. If technology is really only controlled by our social lives and needs, then why do new phones with technology that exceeds that of our needs, keep being developed?

So in all, there are two movements placing social and technology in different places with regards to their convergence.

1. Social Determinism: Technology is an extension of human actors. It is nothing but a tool, as they do as they are told. Technology is thus replacing human labor.
2. Technological Determinism: Technology is unpredictable and sometimes does surprising things that we cannot foresee. Thus, technology is not just an extension of human actors, but must be seen as an actor in itself (non-human actors).

Todays readings:

• Bruno Latour: ‘‘Where Are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts’’ (1992)
• Langdon Winner, “Do Artifacts Have Politics?" (1980)
• Giddings, “Playing with Non-Humans: Digital Games as Techno-Cultural form" (2005)