Media Are Dead, Long Live Media: Apparatgeist’s Capacity for Understanding Media Evolution

TY - CHAP

T1 - Media Are Dead, Long Live Media

T2 - Apparatgeist’s Capacity for Understanding Media Evolution

AU - Aakhus, Mark

N1 - Publisher Copyright: © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021.

PY - 2022/1/1

Y1 - 2022/1/1

N2 - Perpetual Contact anticipated that the mobile phone was exposing a deeper struggle about communication that would be generative of social, technical, and socio-technical practices. Our project was to sketch the global scene at that time and to put forward a simple yet compelling premise for investigating the quickly evolving relationship among communication, technology, society, and culture. We coined the term Apparatgeist to name the dynamic struggle and generative processes underway that would recognize what may be continuous in the human condition but potentially discontinuous in its technical manifestations. Here the claim by some that Apparatgeist mistakenly predicts the homogenization of practice and technology is critiqued. The original formulation of Apparatgeist, and our corollary point about the logic of perpetual contact, is reconsidered for how it holds up in light of developments since its formulation and its insights about the contemporary view of technology in the design of human experience. The chapter concludes by reflecting on how Apparatgeist lends insight that overcomes a significant problem for the persistent classic media studies paradigm for understanding the relation among people, technology, society, and culture, and thus some direction for contemporary analysis of media when content and medium are digitized.

AB - Perpetual Contact anticipated that the mobile phone was exposing a deeper struggle about communication that would be generative of social, technical, and socio-technical practices. Our project was to sketch the global scene at that time and to put forward a simple yet compelling premise for investigating the quickly evolving relationship among communication, technology, society, and culture. We coined the term Apparatgeist to name the dynamic struggle and generative processes underway that would recognize what may be continuous in the human condition but potentially discontinuous in its technical manifestations. Here the claim by some that Apparatgeist mistakenly predicts the homogenization of practice and technology is critiqued. The original formulation of Apparatgeist, and our corollary point about the logic of perpetual contact, is reconsidered for how it holds up in light of developments since its formulation and its insights about the contemporary view of technology in the design of human experience. The chapter concludes by reflecting on how Apparatgeist lends insight that overcomes a significant problem for the persistent classic media studies paradigm for understanding the relation among people, technology, society, and culture, and thus some direction for contemporary analysis of media when content and medium are digitized.

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U2 - 10.1007/978-3-030-84883-5_2

DO - 10.1007/978-3-030-84883-5_2

M3 - Chapter

SN - 9783030848828

SP - 7

EP - 16

BT - Perceiving the Future through New Communication Technologies

PB - Springer International Publishing

ER -