Information Technologies and Social Problems
https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444817708775
new media & society 2018, Vol. 20(7) 2235 –2251
© The Author(s) 2017 Reprints and permissions:
sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1461444817708775
journals.sagepub.com/home/nms
Beyond non-/use: The affected bystander and her escalation
Susann Wagenknecht University of Siegen, Germany
Abstract The article proceeds from the observation that in everyday life we are surrounded by technology, most of which we do not use ourselves. Rather, we are, often involuntarily, subjected to the effects of others’ technology use. The article characterizes this condition as affected bystanding, a condition that comes with quotidian, often banal, experiences of passivity and marginality. The affected bystander is neither entirely included nor excluded by a technological system and the practices of its operation. For this reason, affected bystanding is not adequately accounted for by established categories of exchange, participation, collaboration, use, and non-use. Since affected bystanding is often an undesirable condition, the article discusses how the affected bystander may address her condition—escalate it—by positioning herself as bystanding affector.
Keywords Bystander, hacking, making, non-use, technology activism
Introduction I was in the supermarket. A while ago, when still living in Denmark, before shopping was about buying food for the whole week and calculating the family budget. Making my way through the alleys, I was hiding something in the large pocket of my parka—a TV-B-Gone, a bulky square of black plastic with a green circuit board on top. I had soldered it together with a friend, fixing the PCB, the LEDs, the button … all step by step in a tin-smelling hacker space. There, patient
Corresponding author: Susann Wagenknecht, Department of Social Sciences, University of Siegen, A.-Reichwein-Str. 2, Siegen 57068, Germany. Email: susann.wagenknecht@uni-siegen.de
708775NMS0010.1177/1461444817708775new media & societyWagenknecht research-article2017
Article
2236 new media & society 20(7)
volunteering hackers-instructors had helped us, correcting our soldering mistakes and playing a program onto the chip. Assembling the device had not felt terribly inventive to me. In fact, it had been a bit dull. But now I should have my fun: There they were, the remote television screens in the wine section, and I fumbled for the button. Switched the screens off. The thrill of it. And a flash of embarrassment. For a moment, I felt sorry for the employees. After all, the stupid video advertisement wasn’t their idea. Did anyone notice me? I glanced around but no one paid attention, neither to me nor to the black, silent screens. Seemed I had made it. My attempt, admittedly somewhat lame, to hack the infrastructure of commercial advertising and fight noise pollution, overstimulation, consumerism, the vacuity of visual culture—you name it. The screens stayed black even after I had paid and packed my stuff. I’m sure, though, someone switched them on again. (Personal anecdote)
This anecdote conveys a story about making a TV-B-Gone to hack supermarket televi- sion, a timid sabotage in protest of flashy advertisement. More fundamentally, however, the anecdote is about a condition that precedes and motivates the hacking and making it tells about—unwanted exposure to TV ads in the supermarket, a condition that is utterly banal yet does not square well with common notions of use and consumption. The anec- dote’s protagonist is, in her perception, neither a user nor a consumer of the TV ads. The anecdote hence raises a conceptual challenge, pointing to a lack of vocabulary that this article addresses by outlining the concept of affected bystander.
The article proceeds from the observation that in everyday life we are surrounded by technology, most of which we actually do not use ourselves, not even indirectly. Rather, we are, often involuntarily, subjected to the effects that others’ technology use entails. While we like to picture ourselves as active users (or deliberate non-users) of technology, we are continuously attending to the technologically mediated activities of others and experiencing their impact on our lives. Most of the time, it seems, we background these experiences, remaining what Georg Simmel (1964 [1903]) called blasé: We barely notice that while we are driving our cars, we are evading other vehicles, their noise, and their pollution. We have our routines for keeping an agreeable room temperature in our office, smartly taking into account the building’s semi-automated air-conditioning and our co- workers’ heating habits. Given the emailing and social media practices of colleagues and friends, we develop personal habits for keeping up, staying “visible” while protecting some hours of calm. And we still try to sleep despite the TV noise that emanates from our neighbor’s apartment. In other areas, we may attend to others’ technology use in less routinized ways, developing a critical, also passionate, attitude instead. In the face of government surveillance and corporate monitoring, we are struggling to protect a meas- ure of privacy. We take pride in shunning customer bonus programs but know that others do not, and that their data reveal as much about them as they reveal about us. This is not lamenting, stemming ourselves against the tide of progress. In fact, this is the condition under which most of us live their lives—even the technology-savvy.
In this article, I propose to characterize this condition as affected bystanding, a condi- tion that comes with quotidian—often banal—experiences of passivity and marginality. Since, as I argue in this article, affected bystanders are neither entirely included nor excluded by a technological system and the practices of its operation, affected bystand- ing is not adequately accounted for by established categories of exchange, participation, collaboration, use, and non-use. To address this conceptual gap, I will discuss affected
Wagenknecht 2237
bystanding in terms of post-structuralist reflections, relating to the work of Serres (1982 [1980]), Strathern (1996), and Star (1990). Drawing upon the personal anecdote pre- sented above, I will then go on to discuss how the affected bystander may address her condition—escalate it—by positioning herself as bystanding affector.
Human–technology relations beyond use
To make the argument that the concept of affected bystanding valuably complements existing vocabularies for analyzing human–technology relations, I begin by revisiting existing notions of use and non-use as well as their critique. In particular, I point out the ways in which parts of science and technology studies (STS), human–computer interac- tion (HCI), as well as adjacent research fields seek to move beyond both an all too limit- ing focus on technology use as well as all too rigid dichotomies of use versus non-use.
Before jumping to critique, it is worthwhile to remember that “the user,” too, had to be discovered, made visible, and established as a subjectivity to be accounted for. In the 1970s and 1980s, the user was introduced to studies of groupware development as a novel focus of research—as a hitherto ignored third party, a subject too often left aside in negotiations between stakeholders-managers and designers (see, for example, Nygaard, 1975). But as the user began to take center stage, notions of use and the user have been found to support research approaches that dis-empower humans and truncate the breadth of possible human–technology relations (Agre, 1995).
As Cooper and Bowers (1995) have shown, the portrayal of users as alienated, inef- ficient, unhappy, and helpless has been a crucial element in legitimizing HCI as a field of both academic and corporate research and research-based design. Such a portrayal of the user, however, casts her as passive re-actor, someone who is helplessly “confronted” with technology and in need of assistance: Her performance can be enhanced, the achievement of her goals facilitated, her emotions positively influenced, her practices changed, and the quality of her life improved through the use of technologies that HCI designs. Over recent years, however, the tendency to design for passive users has been criticized sharply, also within the field of HCI (Bannon, 1991, 2011; Redström, 2006).
Lately, research in STS and HCI has increasingly come to focus on human–technol- ogy relations that fail to qualify as use, relations that go “beyond use” or defy “use” as analytic category altogether (Baumer and Brubaker, 2017). In this context, numerous studies of non-use have shown that technology abstinence is a multifaceted phenome- non. Non-users can be extremely selective users; they may have been users before, have tried to become users but failed, or have imagined what it would be like to be users and abstained. Some of them would choose to be users if the socio-technical conditions were right for them. Given its multifaceted character, non-use, like use, is thus not inherently empowering or disempowering. Non-use can be the result of a controlled, deliberate decision not to use a technology, but it also can be involuntary and caused by lack of resources (see, for example, Annafari et al., 2014; Baumer et al., 2015; Gomez et al., 2015; Helsper and Reisdorf, 2017; Ribak and Rosenthal, 2015; Satchell and Dourish, 2009; Wyatt et al., 2002; Wyche et al., 2013). Importantly, it has been argued that an all too simple binary distinction between use and non-use should be avoided (Baumer et al., 2015; Lampe et al., 2013; Neves et al., 2015). In line with this argument, recent research
2238 new media & society 20(7)
has begun to (re-)examine human–technology relations in which technology use is dis- puted and compromised—relations in which use is partly yielded, curtailed, diminished, or denied (Baumer, 2015; Ekbia and Nardi, 2014).
At the same time, “more than use” emerges as a leitmotif in the study of making, hacking, repairing, and crafting—do-it-yourself (DIY) practices defiant of conventional distinctions between use and design (see, for example, Featherman, 2016; Houston et al., 2016; Kuznetsov et al., 2012; Lindtner, 2015; Nguyen, 2016; Ratto and Boler, 2014; Toombs et al., 2015; Wagenknecht and Korn, 2016). In light of this development, David Roedl et al. (2015) argue that the literature on hacking, making, and related subjects introduces a discursive shift particularly in HCI research, a shift in which the once so central notion of the user loses its paradigmatic status and is increasingly accompanied, eclipsed even, by constructs such as “the maker” and “the hacker.” These constructs contrast the conventional user in that they convey a new subjectivity—“a subject that is empowered by the skills and abilities embodied in his or her material relationship to technology” (Roedl et al., 2015: 9). Framed as empowered subjects, the maker and the hacker “call into question the conventional role that HCI designers and researchers occupy as the advocates for users within systems design” (Roedl et al., 2015: 13).
As subjectivities of human–technology relations, “the maker” and “the hacker” strongly feature motifs of action and dominance. They resonate well with what Hannah Arendt calls homo faber, the ideal of man as ceaseless fabricator and ingenious craftsper- son who values skill, performance, creativity, and productivity (Arendt, 1958: 208, 296). This article, however, first ventures into opposite directions, exploring motifs of re- action and passivity. The article’s intention is to cast more light not so much on homo faber, but on those who typically remain in the shades, on the side—onlookers, passers- by, bystanders, people who happen to be “there” but are not ascribed an active role and are, perhaps, unsure whether and how to acquire one. The latter part of this article, then, offers some reflections on how the bystander, when choosing to address her condition, may morph into a subjectivity that reflects some of homo faber’s characteristics.
Perspectives on in-/exclusion
Seeking to develop a finer grip on phenomena of “less than use,” that is, human–technol- ogy relations that do not qualify as proper technology use (and are not covered well by existing accounts of non-use either), I will draw upon post-structuralist perspectives that help elaborate on relational figurations beyond the binary of in-/exclusion.
Parasitism, as Michel Serres (1982 [1980]) suggests, is one such figuration. Serres’ parasite, an uninvited guest, cleverly takes advantage of hospitable circumstances, an environment for which the parasite’s host cares and that he offers to the parasite involun- tarily. The parasite is a deeply provocative figure because it challenges cultural ideals of give and take and questions the assumption that social relations are built upon mutuality and exchange. The parasite is not a partner, and the relation between parasite and host is not a “dyad” in the ordinary meaning of the term. Parasitism lacks the kind of benevolent reciprocity (or vicious tit for tat) through which we usually try to understand social rela- tions. Any description of parasitism has to move beyond the dichotomous vocabulary of friend or enemy, partner or adversary, with or against. The parasite works against its host,
Wagenknecht 2239
diminishes her resources, while accompanying her, chatting her up, entertaining her, and diverting her attention. The parasite does not compensate the host in any useful cur- rency—offered are, at best, forms of compensation that the host has no immediate use for: foreign currencies, untruthful stories, and promises. Still, on Serres’ account, parasit- ism evades any clear-cut moral judgment because it thrives as a, potentially infinite, networked chain. Every host is another’s parasite.
Serres’ parasitism seeks to push social theory beyond all too simple dichotomies of together/apart or in-/exclusion, a concern that strongly resonates with feminist approaches that strive to de-construct binary figures of thought and foreground that which dichoto- mies exclude or leave unaccounted for. Feminism is directing our attention to the impure, the weak, the hybrid, the double-tongued, the overlooked, the suppressed, the tacit, and invisible as well as the ironical. In this vein, feminism is particularly attuned to studying the nuanced dynamics of figurations that oscillate between inclusion and exclusion.
Inclusion and exclusion are intricately interwoven with one another, as Marilyn Strathern argues in her critique Latour’s notion of networks, a notion biased for inclu- sion. In her argument, Strathern elaborates how “hybrids,” situated at network nodes, both “carry the flow and stop it” (Strathern, 1996: 518). While, for example, monetary transactions, as well as ownership more generally, help including and circulating owna- ble objects within one network, they cut objects from other networks, preventing them from proliferating outside the boundaries of their ownership. Ownership and transfers of ownership are complex regimes of truncating the network (exclusion) and extending it (inclusion) at the same time. For example, buying transfers an object into the buyer’s property—it includes the object firmly into the buyer’s network, while it restricts the object’s ability to be included, in a similar capacity, in others’ networks. Here, inclusion and exclusion are woven into one another, and precisely, this weave is what makes the act of buying so powerful.
Note that this perspective brings the provocative character of Serres’ parasite further to the fore. While buying, as an established and valued cultural practice, intertwines inclusion and exclusion of objects in networks in routinized, recognizable ways, parasit- ism puzzles us. As parasitic relationships feature precisely the absence of any such clear- cut transactions as buy and sell, they resist common regimes of network proliferation/ network cut. Instead, parasitic relationships are un-/cooperative forms of loose entangle- ment. They never fully morph into what, judged against the paradigm of ownership, one would typically consider either stable network nodes or bounds.
Buying is typically conceived of as an act of power. But in the face of corporate super- power, customers may find themselves mangled through intricate weaves of inclusion and exclusion that threaten to diminish their agency instead of enhancing it. Customers of mass-produced goods are in no position to negotiate what they are buying (and for which price). Instead, they purchase standardized products at standardized conditions, having corporate standardizations impact their personal identities, relationships, and daily lives. However, as Susan L. Star (1990) points out, standards do not proliferate mechanically—they need to be, sometimes subversively, accommodated.
When Susan L. Star carefully observes how technological standardization shapes practices of work and consumption, she draws attention to the tedious efforts that people make to fit technologically enforced standards to the individual needs and concerns that
2240 new media & society 20(7)
those standards leave unaccounted for. Drawing on personal experiences with onion allergy and American fast food, she proposes, not without a whiff of irony, to make “the work of scraping off the onions” the point of departure for social-scientific studies of technology (Star, 1990: 90). Feminist technology studies should, Star argues, approach the nexus of technologies and conventions with a focus on the experiences of those who are sidelined and de-privileged by technologies: “It is … true that McDonald’s screens out a number of clients in the act of standardizing its empire… Should that be the phe- nomenon we examine—the experience of being a McDonald’s non-user, a McDonald’s resister or even castaway?” (Star, 1990: 89). No, she continues, because you live
with McDonald’s no matter where you fall on the scale of participation, since you live in a landscape with its presence, in a city altered by it, or out in the country where you, at least, drive by it and see the red and gold against the green of the trees, hear the radio advertising it, or have children who can hum its jingle. (Star, 1990: 89)
Therefore, Star suggests, the point of departure for feminist research should not be “that which McDonald’s stratifies, nor even the temporally brief but geographically extensive scope it enjoys and shares with other institutions, nor the market niches which it does not (yet) occupy.” Rather, “Let it be the work of scraping off the onions …. This is that which is permanently escaping, subverting, but nevertheless in relation with the standardized” (Star, 1990: 90). Let it be, in other words, the “invisible work” that makes technologies work, that is, all the rarely acknowledged efforts to appropriate, adapt, repair, mediate, and buffer technology and technology use (Star and Strauss, 1999).
Focusing on the, often invisibilized, efforts that it takes to make technologies work in use helps understand that “technology” is, in fact, a continuous investment of diverse actors, including customers, so-called end-users and people whom I suggest to call affected bystanders—people with little or no official responsibility for the technology’s workings, with little or no ownership of it, and without much say in the way it is and can be used. Making technology work is a process in the course of which people subject themselves to technocratic rationales, to technology’s standards and demands, turning themselves into “human devices” (Ureta, 2015: 7)—and then they do not. “Scraping off the onions” is a metaphor for all the lateral efforts by which people make technology work for them. In this vein, I suggest to focus on the practices by which people relate laterally to technology and to the impact of others’ technology use on their everyday lives. “Lateral,” here, carries a two-fold meaning. It refers to the ways in which people relate to technology “sideways,” as affected bystanders—and it refers to the unorthodox, creative ways in which people manage to do so.
The affected bystander
In this section, I will further unfold the concept of the affected bystander. Before doing so, however, two introductory remarks are in order. First, the affected bystander is a mundane, everyday phenomenon. Affected bystanding is nothing fancy. Second, given the mundanity of a bystander’s situation, issues connected to bystanding are not new and have been discussed in previous research on human–technology relations (see, for
Wagenknecht 2241
example, Ferneley and Light, 2008; Hüttenrauch et al., 2006; Krummheuer, 2015). Typically, however, these discussions do too little to develop the notion of bystanding into a concept that avails itself to more analytic, abstract, and critical perspectives.
The “bystander” has been invoked, for example, in research on issues of privacy, specifi- cally in connection with proliferating augmented reality and lifelogging devices (see, for example, Denning et al., 2014; Hoyle et al., 2014; Mateescu et al., 2015; Singhal et al., 2016)— technologies that can, especially when employed in public and by actors such as the police, gather rich data about people who are not well positioned to secure their privacy. It is clear that the use of such technologies substantially affects passers-by who may not be targeted but have virtually no adequate means of interfering with these technologies (see also Friedman et al., 2006). Moreover, HCI research on public displays has mentioned “bystanders,” albeit as potential contributors and prospective users, that is, as “curious onlookers who may be under- standably shy” but need to be drawn in (Tang et al., 2008: 882), framing bystanding as a transi- tory state, an awkward interim condition that should be dissolved by including bystanders as users. In contrast, this article suggests to consider affected bystanding in its own right.
By way of a definition, I propose to understand affected bystanding as the condition of individuals who involuntarily experience the impact of others’ use of technological systems while not relating to these systems as users themselves. Affected bystanders are confronted with others’ technology use by way of mediate repercussions that are often difficult to foresee, understand, and/or control. Affected bystanding is problematic when the impact of others’ technology use is perceived as undesirable by those affected and when undesirable impact remains unaccounted for by users, designers, stakeholders, and operators of the technology in question.
I suggest the concept of affected bystanding to account for socio-technical configura- tions in which individuals are, to a large degree, deprived of the kind of agency that users or acknowledged stakeholders typically possess. Users of a system are commonly afforded an interface that enables them to adapt the system’s functioning to their needs and interests and, importantly, to switch it off. Stakeholders typically possess the power to shape a system’s design and influence the ways in which it is employed. Yet bystand- ers are usually not supposed to interfere with others’ technology use. Bystanders—qua bystanders—are commonly not offered an interface to interact with a technological sys- tem. There is no switch-off button for bystanders. Affected bystanding, hence, is a condi- tion difficult to change, even difficult to address.
Affected bystanders are, often inconveniently, entangled in a regime of in-/exclusion. On the one hand, they are excluded from technology use; an exclusion may have (but need not be) forced upon them. (As I will elaborate below, affected bystanders may have decided themselves to refrain from technology use, opting for non-use.) On the other hand, affected bystanders are included, whether unintentionally or not, in the impact of technology use. Therefore, affected bystanding calls for analyses that attend to the limited agency that comes with “less than use” relations between individuals and technologies.
The affected bystander in the supermarket
In this section, I return to the anecdote presented at the beginning of this article. The anecdote conveys a rather specific case of affected bystanding, a case that crucially
2242 new media & society 20(7)
involves corporate technology use. While affected bystanding need not necessarily be connected with corporate technology use, the anecdote’s specific case helps unfold how affected bystanding may be woven into everyday practices of consumption. The anec- dote’s protagonist is involuntarily included in the effects of corporate technology use but excluded from interacting with the technology as a user.
The ambiguity of her in-/exclusion entangles the protagonist in a loose network whose reach is difficult for her to contain. Established practices for “cutting” network rela- tions—such as switch-off and also compensation or payment—are not at her disposal. As argued above with reference to Strathern (1996), payment in particular is a powerful form of network closure. But the anecdote’s protagonist is neither in a position to pay her way out of supermarket television, nor is she entitled to demand pay, that is, to demand a compensation for accepting supermarket television. Instead, she is implicitly promised a rather vague compensation: If you watch our television ads, the supermarket seems to whisper, you’ll receive valuable information. And if you buy large quantities of what we advertise, we might be able to sell at a cheaper price …. But information of this kind is a highly elusive currency to be paid with, often not a useful currency at all. In her per- spective, hence, the anecdote’s protagonist is confronted with what Serres (1982 [1980]) describes as parasitism.
The anecdote’s protagonist, one might inject, could plead with the supermarket man- agement. Individual complaints, however, are unlikely to change the marketing policies of national supermarket chains. The protagonist could also try to reduce the possible impact of supermarket television on her—packing earplugs, not looking at the television screens, or making a point of not buying what they advertise. None of these tactics, how- ever, will completely disentangle her from the network into which supermarket televi- sion weaves all customers within its reach. Why not get your groceries elsewhere? This may be a viable way out, depending on the protagonist’s resources to frequent other supermarkets. But it is a way out that, on a broader plane, remains unsatisfying (cf. Hirschman, 1970). Pragmatically, it is often too costly an option for individual actors to avoid the impact of others’ technology use. And analytically, following Star (1990), the interesting question is not how to avoid affected bystanding. Rather, the interesting ques- tion is how to deal with it.
The conceptual politics of affected bystanding
In this section, I discuss what distinguishes the affected bystander from other, related notions—specifically, notions of non-user and “usee” (Baumer, 2015). Drawing these distinctions, I argue, is less a matter of mutually exclusive definitions than a matter of conceptual politics: Who is to argue when (and why) an individual subjected to others’ technology use is an affected bystander, non-user, or usee? And where do such argu- ments lead?
Affected bystanding can be conceived of as a form of non-use. But I argue that the analytic lens of non-/use implies a truncated perspective upon affected bystanding for two reasons. First, as I have elaborated above, for many accounts of non-use, the para- digm of use remains their vanishing point. On these accounts, non-users would be users if only the socio-technical conditions were right for them. In this perspective, affected
Wagenknecht 2243
bystanding is hardly considered in its own right, as a basic condition of contemporary life. Second, following Star (1990), the analytic lens of non-/use screens off the intricate intertwinement of inclusion and exclusion in human–technology configurations. As I have argued, the affected bystander, a nominal non-user, is excluded from relation to a technical system in certain ways—the ways users or acknowledged stakeholders would— but included in the net of impact that the technical system enacts.
Notions of affected bystanding and non-use, hence, are different resources for describ- ing and understanding concrete human–technology configuration. Conceptually, they trigger different questions, and it is a matter of empirical enquiry to understand in how far these questions capture the concerns of the people studied. In the anecdote reported here, the protagonist does neither deliberate whether or not to use the technology she is confronted with (supermarket television), nor is it her primary concern that she is excluded from technology use due to a lack of resources. Rather, the question that the protagonist faces, and tries to solve, is how to react to the technology use of others, fend- ing herself against its impact. The anecdote, then, illustrates how the lens of non-/use is too narrow to account for the various lateral—that is, peripheral, indirect, involuntary, subtle, ingenious, and ephemeral—ways through which people are confronted with and forced to address technologies and the technology use of others. As a concept, the affected bystander should be a tool to address precisely this limitation.
More conceptual distinctions are at stake in the anecdote’s case. Depending on point of view, the anecdote’s protagonist could, after all, also be conceived of as a user or a “target.” For the supermarket management, any customer is a possible receiver (a “tar- get”) of the advertisement that they run in their market. Likewise, the supermarket man- agement may perceive of customers as “users” of their television ads. In contrast to the language of “targets,” perceiving of customers as users avoids inconvenient ethical ques- tions about the desirability of supermarket television and the agency of customers. And indeed, the anecdote’s protagonist of my anecdote could decide to be a user—she could just watch what the screens in the supermarket show. But while the agency of use typi- cally comes with the liberty to terminate use, the anecdote’s protagonist cannot legiti- mately decide to turn the screens off.
To develop a better grip on configurations of agency beyond use and non-use, Baumer (2015) suggests the “usee,” a concept that he uses for account for the implication of individual customers in corporate data-mining practices. According to Baumer, a usee is “used” by systems for data gathering purposes without her being aware of these corpo- rate practices and without having knowingly consented to them. Conceptually, usee and affected bystander are distinct yet related. Baumer characterizes usees as subjects “explicitly targeted by a technological system,” as having “limited awareness of the sys- tem” and as having not knowingly given consent to their implication in the system (Baumer, 2015, see also Peacock, 2014). Each of these three criteria marks a conceptual difference in emphasis between affected bystander and usee. Whether or not individuals have given consent to their implication in the system and whether or not they are aware (and to which degree) of the system are questions left deliberately open by the concept of affected bystanding. And while usees are explicitly targeted by technological systems (as, for example, unaware customers are targeted by the data-mining algorithms of retail companies), for affected bystanders this need not be the case. While usees are exposed
2244 new media & society 20(7)
and exploited, affected bystanders may just be plain neglected and ignored—their pres- ence eludes users and acknowledged stakeholders, ingrained habits of technology use tend to override their concerns, and established design traditions easily blind us to their issues.
The bystanding affector and her TV-B-Gone—an escalation
Affected bystanding, often, is not a satisfying condition. For this reason, this section explores how the affected bystander may address her predicament. What are her possi- bilities for critique, empowerment, and, perhaps, change? Drawing upon the anecdote presented at the beginning of this article, I argue that the affected bystander might engage herself in forms of lateral intervention—acts that transform her from bystander into what I suggest to call bystanding affector.
I suggest to read the above anecdote as the short story of an escalation, an intensifica- tion of tensions without resolving them. The anecdote describes the ephemeral culmina- tion of a previously latent conflict, a singular event during which the affected bystander becomes a bystanding affector. Performing an act of sabotage, she shifts from passive to “active non-participation” (Casemajor et al., 2015). What facilitates this shift is a par- ticular device—the TV-B-Gone. When the anecdote’s protagonist decides to interfere with the supermarket’s ad television (but is not offered any opportunity to do so), she brings a TV-B-Gone and, thereby, creates an interface for herself.
A TV-B-Gone is a universal remote control to switch off nearby television sets, typically in public spaces. Programmed to run through the most common switch-off signals, the device works for a wide range of television sets. Even though fully assem- bled devices are commercially available, TV-B-Gone is predominantly known as an object of DIY building and has acquired almost iconic status in subcultures of making and hacking. With DIY kits widely available for about US$20, TV-B-Gone is a compa- rably easy beginner’s project (Wakkary et al., 2015). TV-B-Gone was invented by Mitch Altman (2010), a San Francisco–based hacker and entrepreneur whose company sells the device. The company website introduces the device as “an environmental management device,” advertising its usefulness in public or commercial spaces where television sets cannot be, or are not supposed to be, switched off at will—at “airports, bars, restaurants, laundromats, etc.” (TV-B-Gone, 2017). As Altman puts it, “[m]any people find that when a TV is on, even when they don’t want to watch it, they have to watch it” and “I created a fun way to get the message out there that turning a TV on or off really is a choice. Anywhere, anytime. Please, go out there and choose” (quoted after Rowell, 2007).
Bringing her TV-B-Gone to the supermarket, the anecdote’s protagonist invests her- self in “invisible work” (cf. Star and Strauss, 1999). Having acquired a DIY kit and assembled it, she walks down the aisles, hiding her device in a pocket, covertly screening her environment for shop assistants. While she tries to keep her actions literally invisible, shunning confrontation with the supermarket personnel, she also engages—subversively and selfishly—in the unaccounted-for work that it takes to make a system “work” in a particular context for a particular set of actors. Switching it off, she adapts supermarket television to her personal preference as a customer.
Wagenknecht 2245
The moral and political value of her efforts is debatable; her actions neither testify to altruistic idealism nor to sustainable activism. The anecdote’s protagonist is not a hero. She dabbles in botched activism because there is a fun opportunity to do so. She experi- ences a trickster’s silly delight in causing mischief, but very much prefers to remain anonymous and avoid any serious argument, hiding in the crowd, bringing home her groceries. An inconvenient question emerges here: Who is the parasite now?
The TV-B-Gone is hardly a tool to “cut the network” between supermarket customer and supermarket. If at all, it helps produce a tiny “creak” in the system (cf. Taylor, 2005). At best, the TV-B-Gone enables the anecdote’s protagonist to perform a gesture: With the device in her hands, the protagonist gestures toward cutting the network, but her gesture remains short-lived and shallow, barely discernible and likely illegible. For supermarket employees, it will be more plausible to assume a technical failure than an act of protest. Has one ever heard of customers who switch off their television because they do not like it? For sure, one has heard of appliances that experience inexplicable breakdowns, switching off themselves for unknown reasons.
The bystanding affector is a fleeting and often barely visible figure. In the super- market anecdote, the bystanding affector mobilizes the subjectivities of hacker and maker—hacking the supermarket’s information technology after having assembled the tool to do so in a making workshop. Yet, these acts of making and hacking become meaningful only against the backdrop of affected bystanding. It is only against this condition that making and hacking become meaningful. And while the difference between hacker/maker and customer appears to be rather stark, this contrast should not let to believe that hacking/making could override the condition of exposure in which the customer finds herself. The bystanding affector makes an ephemeral appearance, whereas the affected bystander is the one who will return to pick up some more grocer- ies a couple of days later.
Beyond TV-B-Gone, there is in fact a range of conventional (“household”) tools to mitigate the unaccounted-for repercussions that arise for bystanders from others’ tech- nology use—think of headphones that come equipped with a noise-canceling functional- ity or browser filters that prevent children from being confronted with images of, for example, brutality that others exchange online. More examples of devices for affected bystanders can be found in “geek” subculture and critical design. One example are radio- frequency identification (RFID) secure passport or wallet sleeves that prevent undesired attempts to remotely read-off sensible information stored on the passport or credit card chip. Such covers are widely available online. Another example from the realm of activ- ist art is Mark Shepard’s Sentient City Survival Kit, an art project which comprises also the CCD-Me not umbrella (Shepard, 2016). The umbrella is lined with infrared LEDs whose signal prevents a range of visual surveillance algorithms from tracking the umbrella user. Carl DiSalvo (2012) interprets Shepard’s umbrella device as a piece of “adversarial design” that works to “disarticulate” existing socio-technical configura- tions. Yet another example is Tad Hirsch’s i-See, a web-based application mapping sur- veillance cameras in urban environments.
Not all of these devices enable affected bystanders to become bystanding affectors. Evidently, single artifacts can do but little to sustain bystanding affectors beyond moments of fleeting, somewhat shallow activism. This shallowness, however, has less to
2246 new media & society 20(7)
do with the resolve, the ingenuity, and the resources that bystanding affectors are muster- ing. Rather, it is a result of the condition that underlies their actions—their affected bystanding and the small scope of agency that comes with it. Bystanders-turned-affectors interfere from the sideline because they are, often, not admitted to effective, established arenas of dialogue, criticism, and conflict.
There are further approaches to address issues of affected bystanding, both for the affected and for research that seeks to understand and empower them. Researchers in the field of HCI have, for example, begun to probe ways in which to “undesign,” minimize, de-construct, harness, or simply remove technologies to address undesirable and far- reaching effects of technology use upon users and affected non-users (Baumer and Silberman, 2011; Pierce, 2012). Moreover, researchers in STS and adjacent fields have suggested to mobilize Dewey’s notion of “publics” to study and support those affected by infrastructural changes and technological development (as, for example, in Irani and Silberman, 2013; Le Dantec and DiSalvo, 2013; Marres, 2012). A public, in Dewey’s sense of the term, designates a group of individuals “indirectly and seriously affected” by transactions in which they are not immediately involved (Dewey, 1954 [1927]: 35). Such publics, Dewey points out, can effectively lobby for their cause if they find ways to establish collective agency. As Marres argues, Dewey’s publics are shaped not only by their exposure to the impact of transactions external to their agency but also crucially by their “attachments” to specific issues, that is, dependencies and commitments that a pub- lic’s exposure to externalities brings to the fore (Marres, 2007).
Yet dependencies have to be uncovered, attachments need to be cultivated and expressed, the spill-over effects of others’ transaction have to be traced, their impact has to be established, and so on. Dewey’s publics are an intricate, laborious endeavor. Affected bystanding, in contrast, is what precedes and informs the formation of such publics. Affected bystanding is a basic condition because, as Dewey notes, some of the consequences of human action regularly “extend to those who do not directly share in the performance of acts” (Dewey, 1954 [1927]: 35). But while Dewey certainly had a notion of the crowdedness of urban life in the early 20th century, he must have been unaware of the scales and the reach of technologically mediated action today, a development that lets the consequences of human action travel further, making the formation of publics more difficult.
Conclusion
Intrusive overstimulation—the problematic raised by the anecdote at the beginning of the article—is not new. As Simmel (1964 [1903]) famously wrote at the beginning of the last century, metropolitan individuality emerges from an intensified emotional life, caused by the permanent swift change in emotional stimuli that the socio-technical den- sity of urban space produces. To deal with the complex, varied, and fleeting impressions that city dwellers continuously encounter, Simmel argued, urban individuality has adopted an attitude of blasé—a sophisticated form of indifference, a complacent matter- of-factness, a dispassionate connoisseurship for the money value of things and a culti- vated disinterest in close social encounter. Simmel’s notion of blasé remains to the point, headphones being, perhaps, its contemporary epitome. With headphones to cover their
Wagenknecht 2247
ears, people in buses, trains, and on sidewalks shun themselves from interaction with the myriads of strangers who immediately surround them. But not everyone wears expensive headphones, and what the notion of blasé does not account for is the mounting irritation about the pulsing bass that emanates from others’ music playing devices.
Urban space no longer is, and probably never was, a place reserved for practicing a rational, distanced outlook on the world. Rather, the metropolitan everyday is a site of mundane anger and frustration, emotions enhanced by the anonymity and technological mediation of the forms of human encounter that urban infrastructures facilitate (Katz, 1999). For members of network societies (Castells, 1996), where networked mobilities fluidly redraw the boundaries between public and private (Sheller and Urry, 2003), urban life is characterized not so much by meeting strangers in person but by the impact that their technologically mediated actions have upon our lives. In the future, this impact will increase in strength and pervasiveness, throwing the limits of blasé into sharp relief.
In this article, I have suggested a notion of the affected bystander (and her activist alter ego, the bystanding affector) to draw attention to human–technology relations that are not well accounted for by existing vocabularies of use and non-use. I have relied on a personal anecdote to unfold an example of affected bystanding and its activist escala- tion. The anecdote illustrates how in practice “empowered” and “dis-empowered” human–technology relations interweave, evolve, challenge, and stabilize one another (Casemajor et al., 2015). With affected bystanding, I seek to cast light on those socio- technical configurations that form the backdrop against which practices of hacking and making, along with their vision of empowerment and “more than use,” may unfold. While I deliberately offer a rather broad notion of affected bystanding (as experiencing the impact of others’ technology use), the anecdote presented at the beginning of the article focuses on a more specific issue of corporate technology use. The anecdote deals with a rather banal case of customers’ subjection to corporate marketing practices. Other, less trivial cases of, for example, privacy violations and environmental pollution will have to be discussed in the future. Meanwhile, I have used the case of my anecdote to elaborate upon the conceptual politics of affected bystanding, discussing the differences between “affected bystander,” “non-user,” “user,” and “usee.”
It stands to reason that issues of affected bystanding, particularly involving corpo- rate uses of technology, will become more pressing in the future. When Mark Zuckerman promises us a “more open and connected” world (Hoffmann et al., 2018), he advocates for pervasive (i.e. invasive) socio-technical interconnections, a world mediated by individual customers’ use of corporately owned technology. The net- worked character of our social presence, the crowdedness of urbanized space, the increasingly subtle design of the technologies we use, their growing proliferation, the effectiveness and scale of their functioning, the heightened speed of innovation, and the lag of public regulation in the face of corporate oligarchies—taken together, these developments are very likely to make us, more and more, conscious of our affected bystanding to others’ technology use.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Cornelius Schubert, Tobias Röhl, and Jörg Potthast for their feed- back and encouragement.
2248 new media & society 20(7)
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
References
Agre PE (1995) Conceptions of the user in computer systems design. In: Thomas PJ (ed.) The Social and Interactional Dimensions of Human-Computer Interfaces. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 67–106.
Altman M (2010) Make cool things with microcontrollers! In: Proceedings of the fourth interna- tional conference on tangible, embedded, and embodied interaction (TEI ‘10), Cambridge, MA, 25–27 January, pp. 361–364. New York: ACM.
Annafari MT, Axelsson AS and Bohlin E (2014) A socio-economic exploration of mobile phone service have-nots in Sweden. New Media & Society 16(3): 415–433.
Arendt H (1958) The Human Condition. Chicago, IL; London: The University of Chicago Press. Bannon L (1991) From human factors to human actors: The role of psychology and human-com-
puter interaction studies in system design. In: Greenbaum J and Kyng M (eds) Design at Work: Cooperative Design of Computer Systems. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, pp. 25–44.
Bannon L (2011) Reimagining HCI: Toward a more human-centered perspective. Interactions 18(4): 50–57.
Baumer EPS (2015) Usees. In: Proceedings of the 33rd annual ACM conference on human fac- tors in computing systems (CHI ‘15), Seoul, Republic of Korea, 18–23 April, pp. 3295–3298. New York: ACM.
Baumer EPS and Brubaker JR (2017) Post-userism. In: Proceedings of the 35th annual ACM conference on human factors in computing systems (CHI ‘17), Denver, CO,6–11 May, pp. 6291–6303. New York: ACM.
Baumer EPS and Silberman M (2011) When the implication is not to design (technology). In: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems (CHI ‘11), Vancouver, BC, Canada, 7–12 May, pp. 2271–2274. New York: ACM.
Baumer EPS, Burrell J, Ames MG, et al. (2015) On the importance and implications of studying technology non-use. Interactions 22(2): 52–56.
Casemajor N, Couture S, Delfin M, et al. (2015) Non-participation in digital media: Toward a framework of mediated political action. Media, Culture & Society 37(6): 1–17.
Castells M (1996) The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture, Volume 1: The Rise of the Network Society. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Cooper G and Bowers J (1995) Representing the user: Notes on the disciplinary rhetoric of human-computer interaction. In: Thomas PJ (ed.) The Social and Interactional Dimensions of Human-Computer Interfaces. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 48–66.
Denning T, Dehlawi Z and Kohno T (2014) In situ with bystanders of augmented reality glasses: Perspectives on recording and privacy-mediating technologies. In: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems (CHI ‘14), Toronto, ON, Canada, 26 April–1 May, pp. 2377–2386. New York: ACM.
Dewey J (1954 [1927]) The Public and Its Problems. Athens: Swallow Press, Ohio University Press.
DiSalvo C (2012) Adversarial Design. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Ekbia H and Nardi B (2014) Heteromation and its (dis)contents: The invisible division of labor
between humans and machines. First Monday. DOI: 10.5210/fm.v19i6.5331. Featherman C (2016) DIY citizenship: Critical making and social media. New Media & Society
18(4): 672–674.
Wagenknecht 2249
Ferneley E and Light B (2008) Unpacking user relations in an emerging ubiquitous computing environment: Introducing the bystander. Journal of Information Technology 23(3): 163–175.
Friedman B, Kahn PH Jr, Hagman J, et al. (2006) The watcher and the watched: Social judgments about privacy in a public place. Human-Computer Interaction 21(2): 235–272.
Gomez R, Foot K, Young M, et al. (2015) Pulling the plug visually: Images of resistance to ICTs and connectivity. First Monday. DOI: 10.5210/fm.v20i11.6286.
Helsper EJ and Reisdorf BC (2017) The emergence of a “digital underclass” in Great Britain and Sweden: Changing reasons for digital exclusion. New Media & Society 19(8): 1253–1270.
Hirschman AO (1970) Exit, Voice, and Loyality: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Hoffmann AL, Proferes N and Zimmer M (2018) “Making the world more open and connected”: Mark Zuckerberg and the discursive construction of Facebook and its users. New Media & Society 20(1): 199–218.
Houston L, Jackson SJ, Rosner DK, et al. (2016) Values in repair. In: Proceedings of the 2016 CHI conference on human factors in computing systems (CHI ‘16), Santa Clara, CA, 7–12 May, pp. 1403–1414. New York: ACM.
Hoyle R, Templeman R, Armes S, et al. (2014) Privacy behaviors of lifeloggers using wearable cameras. In: Proceedings of the 2014 ACM international joint conference on pervasive and ubiquitous computing (UbiComp ‘14), Seattle, WA, 13–17 September, pp. 571–582. New York: ACM.
Hüttenrauch H, Eklundh KS, Green A, et al. (2006) Investigating spatial relationships in human-robot interaction. In: Proceedings of the 2006 IEEE/RSJ international conference on intelligent robots and systems, Beijing, China, 9–15 October, pp. 5052–5059. New York: IEEE.
Irani LC and Silberman MS (2013) Turkopticon: Interrupting worker invisibility in amazon mechanical turk. In: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems (CHI ‘13), Paris, 27 April–2 May, pp. 611–620. New York: ACM.
Katz J (1999) How Emotions Work. Chicago, IL; New York: The University of Chicago Press. Krummheuer AL (2015) Users, bystanders and agents: Participation roles in human-agent inter-
action. In: Abascal J, Barbosa S, Fetter M, et al. (eds) Proceedings of Human-Computer Interaction (INTERACT‘15). Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 240–247.
Kuznetsov S, Taylor AS, Regan T, et al. (2012) At the seams: DIYbio and opportunities for HCI. In: Proceedings of the designing interactive systems conference (DIS ‘12), Newcastle upon Tyne, 11–15 June, pp. 258–267. New York: ACM.
Lampe C, Vitak J and Ellison N (2013) Users and nonusers: Interactions between levels of adoption and social capital. In: Proceedings of the 2013 conference on computer supported cooperative work (CSCW ‘13), San Antonio, TX, 23–27 February, pp. 809–820. New York: ACM.
Le Dantec CA and DiSalvo C (2013) Infrastructuring and the formation of publics in participatory design. Social Studies of Science 43(2): 241–264.
Lindtner S (2015) Hacking with Chinese characteristics. The promises of the maker move- ment against China’s manufacturing culture. Science, Technology & Human Values 40(5): 854–879.
Marres N (2007) The issues deserve more credit: Pragmatist contributions to the study of public involvement in controversy. Social Studies of Science 37(5): 759–780.
Marres N (2012) Material Participation: Technology, the Environment and Everyday Publics. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Mateescu AC, Rosenblat A and boyd d (2015) Police body-worn cameras, 24 February. Available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2569481 (accessed 15 October 2016).
2250 new media & society 20(7)
Neves BB, Monteiro de Matos J, Rente R, et al. (2015) The “non-aligned”: Young people’s narra- tives of rejection of social networking sites. Young 23(2): 116–135.
Nguyen LU (2016) Infrastructural action in Vietnam: Inverting the techno-politics of hacking in the global South. New Media & Society 18(4): 637–652.
Nygaard K (1975) Arbejdsformer i systemudvikling. Aarhus-konference januar 1975. DAIMI report series 4.46. Aarhus Universitet. Available at: http://ojs.statsbiblioteket.dk/index.php/ daimipb/article/view/6465 (accessed 27 October 2016).
Peacock SE (2014) How web tracking changes user agency in the age of Big Data: The used user. Big Data & Society 1(2): 1–11.
Pierce J (2012) Undesigning technology: Considering the negation of design by design. In: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems (CHI ‘12), Austin, TX, May 5–10, pp. 957–966. New York: ACM.
Ratto M and Boler M (2014) DIY Citizenship: Critical Making and Social Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Redström J (2006) Towards user design? On the shift from object to user as the subject of design. Design Studies 27(2): 123–139.
Ribak R and Rosenthal M (2015) Smartphone resistance as media ambivalence. First Monday. DOI: 10.5210/fm.v20i11.6307.
Roedl D, Bardzell S and Bardzell J (2015) Sustainable making? Balancing optimism and criticism in HCI discourse. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction. DOI: 10.1145/2699742.
Rowell L (2007) Gadget crazy! netWorker 11(3): 18–23. Satchell C and Dourish P (2009) Beyond the user: Use and non-use in HCI. In: Proceedings of the
21st annual conference of the Australian computer-human interaction special interest group: design: open 24/7 (OZCHI ‘09), Melbourne, VIC, Australia, 23–27 November, pp. 9–16. New York: ACM.
Serres M (1982 [1980]) The Parasite. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Sheller M and Urry J (2003) Mobile transformations of “public” and “private” life. Theory, Culture
& Society 20(3): 107–125. Shepard M (2016) Sentient city survival kit. Available at: http://survival.sentientcity.net/umbrella.
html (accessed 20 October 2016). Simmel G (1964 [1903]) The metropolis and mental life. In: Simmel G (ed.) The Sociology of
Georg Simmel (trans. K Wolff). New York: Free Press, pp. 409–424. Singhal S, Neustaedter C, Schiphorst T, et al. (2016) You are being watched: Bystanders’ perspec-
tive on the use of camera devices in public spaces. In: Proceedings of the 2016 CHI confer- ence extended abstracts on human factors in computing systems (CHI EA ‘16), Santa Clara, CA, 7–12 May, pp. 3197–3203. New York: ACM.
Star SL (1990) Power, technology and the phenomenology of conventions: On being allergic to onions. The Sociological Review 38(S1): 26–56.
Star SL and Strauss A (1999) Layers of silence, arenas of voice: The ecology of visible and invis- ible work. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) 8(1–2): 9–30.
Strathern M (1996) Cutting the network. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 2(3): 517–535.
Tang A, Finke M, Blackstock M, et al. (2008) Designing for bystanders: Reflections on building a public digital forum. In: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in comput- ing systems (CHI ‘08), Florence, 5–10 April, pp. 879–882. New York: ACM.
Taylor PA (2005) From hackers to hacktivists: Speed bumps on the global superhighway? New Media & Society 7(5): 625–646.
Toombs AL, Bardzell S and Bardzell J (2015) The proper care and feeding of hackerspaces: Care ethics and cultures of making. In: Proceedings of the 33rd annual ACM conference on human
Wagenknecht 2251
factors in computing systems (CHI ‘15), Seoul, Republic of Korea, 18–23 April, pp. 629–638. New York: ACM.
TV-B-Gone (2017) TV-B-Gone universal remote control. Available at: http://www.tvbgone.com/ (accessed 14 January 2017).
Ureta S (2015) Assembling Policy: Transantiago, Human Devices, and the Dream of a World- Class Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Wagenknecht S and Korn M (2016) Hacking as transgressive infrastructuring: Mobile phone net- works and the German Chaos Computer club. In: Proceedings of the 19th ACM conference on computer-supported cooperative work & social computing (CSCW ‘16), San Francisco, CA, 27 February–2 March, pp. 1104–1117. New York: ACM.
Wakkary R, Schilling ML, Dalton MA, et al. (2015) Tutorial authorship and hybrid designers: The joy (and frustration) of DIY tutorials. In: Proceedings of the 33rd annual ACM conference on human factors in computing systems (CHI ‘15), Seoul, Republic of Korea, 18–23 April, pp. 609–618. New York: ACM.
Wyatt S, Thomas G and Terranova T (2002) They came, they surfed, they went back to the beach: conceptualizing use and non-use of the Internet. In: Woolgar S (ed.) Virtual Society? Technology, Cyberbole, Reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 23–40.
Wyche SP, Schoenebeck SY and Forte A (2013) Facebook is a luxury: An exploratory study of social media use in rural Kenya. In: Proceedings of the 2013 conference on computer sup- ported cooperative work (CSCW ‘13), San Antonio, TX, 23–27 February, pp. 33–44. New York: ACM.
Author biography
Susann Wagenknecht is a post-doctoral researcher at the University in Siegen, Germany, working in the fields of sociology of technology, Science and Technology studies (STS), and Computer- Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). Her current research focuses on the design and mainte- nance of public infrastructures as well as hacking and security research.