Annotated Bibliography

ISSN: 1795-6889

https://ht.csr-pub.eu Volume 18(1), June 2022, 1-5

1

From the Editors-in-Chief

THE VALUE OF SUPERDIVERSE HUMAN-TECHNOLOGY ENTANGLEMENTS

Kristiina Korjonen‐Kuusipuro South-Eastern Finland University

of Applied Sciences

Finland

ORCID 0000-0002-8528-0237

Adam Wojciechowski Lodz University of Technology

Poland ORCID 0000-0003-3786-7225

Abstract: Human-technology relations are time and place related processes. Today, it is

very common to describe human-technology interaction by stating that technology is

ubiquitous and permeating all aspects of our everyday lives. This is often compounded by

the fact that technological development has been rapid, and it seems to be accelerating.

This speed makes the understanding the effects that technology has on us and our lives

challenging or even difficult to realise. These kinds of notions have been repeated for

decades already. The point here is not to criticize other scholars, but to argue that to

reveal the value of quotidian human-technology entanglements we need to focus on the

most mundane parts of our lives, scrutinizing something we do not necessary recall nor

take notice of. This has been labelled as the “secret world of doing nothing” by

ethnologists Billy Ehn and Orvar Löfgeren (2010) to describe the most mundane

activities of our everyday lives.

Keywords: technological development, technology, human-technology, technoculture.

©2022 Kristiina Korjonen‐Kuusipuro & Adam Wojciechowski, and the Centre of

Sociological Research, Poland

DOI: https://doi.org/10.14254/1795-6889.2022.18-1.1

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Korjonen‐Kuusipuro, & Wojciechowski

2

Sifting Understandings of Technology and the Digital Everyday

Looking back, it is easy to see how the developments in technology have shaped

researchers’ understanding and interests. In the late 1980’s and early 90’s researchers

understood new technologies, the internet, and developing digital world as a new realm, new

entity where different kinds of cultures could evolve. For example, in 1991 Constance Penley

and Andrew Ross wrote about technoculture, and the need to understand both pros and cons

of new technologies. They were concerned about the spread of Western technologies and how

this might impact other cultures. They argued that technologies were far from neutral, “like

all technologies, they are ultimately developed in the interests of industrial and corporate

profits and seldom in the name of greater community participation or creative autonomy”

(Penley & Ross 1991, xii). Some scholars criticized the concept of technoculture as being

connected to technological determinism, but Penley and Ross have stressed the importance of

cultural negotiations before adopting new technologies to limit the westernisation that they

might bring. They also have raised the importance of bringing forth different, parallel

narratives that can exist simultaneously.

A few years later, anthropologist Arturo Escobar and his colleagues wrote about Cyberia,

a new cultural order, which described the social changes brought about by computers and

information and biological technologies (Escobar 1994). Cyberia was seen as a concrete

space, clearly distinct from everyday life. From the mid-2000s onwards, online research

focused on Web 2.0 thinking, the backbone of which was formed by social media and various

applications such as Facebook (Miller 2011) or social games such as Second Life (Boellstorff

2008) and their cultural reviews (Caliandro 2018). The concept of Cyberia seems to be

constantly evolving, in part due to the development of new platforms such as the metaverse.

In 2010s, phenomena such as datafication, big data, and algorithms have become the subject

of research (see, e.g., van Dijck 2014; Lehtiniemi and Ruckenstein 2019; Lugosi & Quinton

2018). Researchers have also discussed widely issues of inequalities, power relations,

artificial intelligence, and ethical aspects of technology in the online world (e.g., Helsper

2021; Hine 2015; Richardson 2015). These discussions indicate how important understanding

and conceptualising time, and temporalities is.

Human-Material Entanglements

Human-technology relations are also part of our material relations, and this materiality is

closely intertwined with the social and cultural. Digital technologies have also created a form

of materiality, which is not so much ‘im/material’ but rather “in-material”’, and we are not

always even aware of all the forms of materialities that exist (van den Boomen et al. 2009, 9).

For example, software is a kind of materiality incorporated in a physical device that we do

not often consider material, because materiality is usually connected to tangible things.

These material relations are also connected to a rather controversial question concerning

agency: who possesses the ability to act? In her research, Kristiina Korjonen-Kuusipuro

studied both the digital everyday of older adults and young people and learned that the “new

digital normal” means different things for different people. On the one hand, older adults are

often seen to be at risk of marginalization because of digitalization, and they are encouraged,

sometimes even obliged to learn how to use, and use technological devices and services. On

The Value of Superdiverse Human-Technology Entanglements

3

the other hand, younger people are still often referred as digital natives, very competent users

of all digital services and devices. With youth, the focus of discourses is often on the time

spent using digital devices (so-called screen time), and the level of addiction they may have

developed when gaming or just watching YouTube, for example.

Future Avenues for Understanding Superdiversity

We often expect technology to be something magical and we sometimes even believe in “a

digital promised land”. However, it has become clear that technology does not bring equal

opportunities and possibilities to all (for example, Helsper 2021). When doing research on

quotidian human-technology relations, we are faced with superdiversity, the diversification of

diversity (Vertovec 2007). The concept of superdiversity is usually used in migration or

sociolinguistic contexts (for example Blommaert 2013), but Varis and Wang (2011) have

used the concept to describe the diversity of the internet as a space where “the diversity is

constrained by a complex of normative struggles, as new forms of meaning-making are

accompanied with new systems of normativity”. The complexity of human-technology

entanglements is overwhelming, and the challenge is how to capture and conceptualize it

adequately. From the human viewpoint techno-anthropology (e.g., Ruckenstein 2015) might

be one solution. On the other hand, from the technological viewpoint human-computer

interaction and user experience studies support the discovery of useable and intuitive human

technology relations. Together these viewpoints enhance the understanding of human-

technology relations and may reveal the hidden patterns people and technologies co-construct

in their daily lives.

Even though there are different ways of looking at human-technology relations, what is

usually neglected are the various ways how cultural values, norms, practices, and meanings

influence these relations. Culture means also sharing, and this sharing may arise from the

need of reciprocity, an asymmetry between informal and formal knowledge, or a need to act

through local communities, rather than individuals. Understanding differences among

communities needs an empathetic understanding, because it is only through empathy that

different kinds of experiences and voices can be heard. There is also knowledge that is not or

cannot be expressed in a narrative form, with words. This knowledge includes for example

bodily activities, feelings, emotions, and affects. These are challenging, but not impossible to

research. For example, sensory ethnography developed by Sarah Pink (2009) offers one

possible means of considering our perceptions, place relations, knowing, memory and

imagination. It is also possible to combine sensory ethnography with participatory methods

for more collaborative knowledge-making in which discursive, embodied and non-human

perspectives that come into being in multiple intra-actions (for more about intra-actions, see

Barad 2007; about collaborative knowledge-making for example Suopajärvi 2017).

Interestingly, technological imagination, or even daydreaming can have the power to

allow people to explore possible futures, the abnormal, and even crazy ideas (see also Ehn &

Löfgren 2010; Halse 2013), but also allow them to explore their everyday life as a

meaningful subject for research. Sometimes people involved in research projects are skeptical

about the significance of their mundane experiences. Therefore, we should also develop ways

how we in concretely show people in what ways their experiential knowledge has been used,

for example in co-design processes. Ethical issues will need to be carefully considered within

Korjonen‐Kuusipuro, & Wojciechowski

4

these processes. For example, those who plan technical solutions for older adults often justify

them by saying that it may reduce the need to move around the house or reduce their need to

visit local services in person, for example. However, this kind of movement could be of vital

importance to support the older people’s physical and mental activity. Furthermore, data

recorded when creating or profiling technology for society should also be handled with

caution. Very often they hide traits, perhaps unintentionally, that we seemingly do not notice,

and in the wrong hands can be used to build discriminatory mechanisms.

Despite all these technological, social and cultural developments and changes, we still

need to stress that technologies are far from neutral. They are results of social processes and

include multiple power relations (also Penley and Ross 1991). From the social and cultural

point of view, human-technology relations are also about belonging to society. The sense of

belonging is central to human experience; it is a relational and dynamic process of emotional

attachment that is under continuous (re)negotiation and requires contextualized definitions.

Thus, scrutinizing both the human and the technological is of vital importance for equality of

digital societies.

REFERENCES Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway. Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and

meaning. Duke University Press.

Blommaert, J. (2013). Ethnography, Superdiversity and Linguistic Landscapes: Chronicles of Complexity.

Bristol, Blue Ridge Summit: Multilingual Matters. https://doi.org/10.21832/9781783090419

Boellstorff, T. (2008). Coming of Age in Second Life. An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human.

Princeton University Press.

van den Boomen, M., Lammes, S., Lehmann, A-S., & Raessens, J. (Eds.), (2009). Digital Material. Tracing

New Media in Everyday life and Technology. Amsterdam University Press.

Caliandro, A. (2018). Digital Methods for Ethnography: Analytical Concepts for Ethnographers Exploring

Social Media Environments. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 47 (5), 551–578.

doi:10.1177/0891241617702960

van Dijck, J. (2014). Datafication, dataism and dataveillance: Big Data between scientific paradigm and

ideology. Surveillance & Society, 12(2), 197–208. doi:10.24908/ss.v12i2.4776

Ehn, B., & Löfgren, O. (2010). The Secret World of Doing Nothing. University of California Press.

Escobar, A. (1994). Welcome to Cyberia. Notes on the Anthropology of Cybercultre. Current Anthropology 35,

(3), 211–231.

Halse, J. (2013). Ethnographies of the possible. In: W. Gunn, T. Otto, R.C. Smith (Eds.), Design Anthropology:

Theory and Practice (pp. 180–196). Bloomsbury Academic.

Helsper, E.J. (2021). The Digital Disconnect. The Social Causes and Consequences of Digital Inequalities.

SAGE.

Hine, C. (2015). Ethnography for the Internet. Embedded, embodied and everyday. Routledge.

Korjonen-Kuusipuro, K., Hujala, M., Pätäri, S., Bergman, JP, & Olkkonen, L. (2017). The emergence and

diffusion of grassroots energy innovations: Building an interdisciplinary approach. Journal of Cleaner

Production, 140(3), 1156–1164. doi:10.1016/j.jclepro.2016.10.047

Lehtiniemi, T. & Ruckenstein, M. (2019). The social imaginaries of data activism. Big Data & Society 6(1), 1–

12. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951718821146.

The Value of Superdiverse Human-Technology Entanglements

5

Lugosi, P. & Quinton, S. (2018). More-than-human netnography. Journal of Marketing Management, 34(3–4),

287–313. https://doi.org/10.1080/0267257X.2018.1431303

Miller, D., (2011). Tales from Facebook. Polity.

Penley, C., & Ross, A. (Eds.) (1991). Technoculture. University of Minnesota Press.

Pink, S. (2009). Doing Sensory Ethnography. SAGE.

Pink, S. (2012). Situating Everyday Life: Practices and Places. SAGE.

Richardson, K. (2015). An Anthropology of Robots and AI: Annihilation Anxiety and Machines. Routledge. doi:

10.4324/9781315736426

Ruckenstein, M. (2015). Uncovering Everyday Rhythms and Patterns: Food tracking and new forms of visibility

and temporality in health care. Techno-Anthropology in Health Informatics: Methodologies for Improving

Human-Technology Relations, 215, 28–40. doi:10.3233/978-1-61499-560-9-28

Suopajärvi, T. (2017). Knowledge-making on ‘ageing in a smart city’ as socio-material power dynamics of

participatory action research. Action Research, 15(4), 386–401. doi: 10.1177/1476750316655385

Varis, P. & Wang, X. (2011). Superdiversity on the Internet: A Case from China. Diversities, 13(2), 71–83.

Vertovec, S. (2007). Super-diversity and its implications. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 30(6), 1024–1054. doi:

10.1080/01419870701599465

Authors’ Note

All correspondence should be addressed to

Kristiina Korjonen-Kuusipuro

South-Eastern Finland University of Applied Sciences (XAMK)

Finland

[email protected]

ORCID 0000-0002-8528-0237

Adam Wojciechowski

Lodz University of Technology

Poland

[email protected]

ORCID 0000-0003-3786-7225

Human Technology ISSN 1795-6889

https://ht.csr-pub.eu