(the following text is part of my master’s thesis)

In his book Media Life, Mark Deuze uses the term “media” interchangeably with “information and communication technologies”, his definition covering “any systems (symbolic or technological) that enable, structure or amplify human communication” (Deuze, 2015, p. 9). The thesis of his book is the strong claim that we do not live next to or merely with technologies and media, but that we live inside media. In today’s Western world, media are ubiquitous and all-pervading. Deuze urges us to accept the fact that our society is fully mediatised and to begin understanding the relationship between people and technologies through precisely this lens. That, however, means that technological and social determinism are not suitable tools for looking at a mediatised society, for they implicitly assume either that technology stands outside society and entirely determines its course, as we see in the case of technological determinism, or rather that society has technology entirely under control and that technologies exert no influence back on the social sphere, as social and cultural determinism would claim. Deuze remarks that neither of these determinisms properly illuminates the actual relationship between people and technology, which is marked not so much by the primacy of one over the other as by mutual dependence. Deuze, along with many other theorists he cites, leans towards the inseparability of the social and the technological. Media are the sociotechnical fabric of our lives, which cannot be removed and which resists all efforts to liquidate it; as Petříček comments, “we are condemned to mediation” (Petříček, 2008, p. 13). Accepting media is made easier by the fact that they gradually fade from our phenomenological perception of everyday life. They become invisible to us and always at hand, which is one of the goals of the approaches of ubiquitous and ambient computing, but at the same time our ignorance of what media do to us deepens. They become a black box that most of society cannot see into.

What escapes us is what Simondon already pointed out with his concept of technicity: media are part of a vast technological infrastructure of further objects and processes that we are unable to perceive. On a reading of Flusser (Flusser, 2013), a new inequality is arising in society, one reminiscent of the split between the illiterate public and the intellectual elite embodied by the church, which could read the dominant code of the time: the alphabet. Above all the Catholic church and the literate priestly elite became for the rest of society a medium between God and earthly life. Priests interpreted the world, and their interpretation of the world influenced the lives of many people. After the mathematisation of society begun by Galileo and developed by Descartes, for whom the world was a great book written in the language of mathematics, mathematics itself gradually becomes the dominant code. Those who master it are the new interpreters of the world, because they possess models for predicting and explaining how the world works. Although Flusser did not comment on the rise of the network of networks, the internet, it is my opinion that in an age of ubiquitous computing, mobile applications and the debate about programming becoming a new kind of compulsory literacy, his ideas are still valid, if not more so. People who can mathematise and algorithmise the natural and the social world are the new media and interpreters of the world, and they are helped in this by the change of paradigms in which we have moved from theology to scientism and materialism.

We cannot, however, expect the whole of society to consist only of scientists, mathematicians or programmers, as one of the modern forefathers of the dystopian novel, Yevgeny Zamyatin, imagined, for example, in his work My. Science and mathematics have learned to make their results accessible to the public through popularising articles and books. What form of popularisation can be found in the World of Media? The cognitive semiotician Göran Sonesson remarks, much like Mark Deuze, that ordinary life today is deeply mediated by invisible media, which “disappear into natural user interfaces” and “fade away as the infrastructures of everyday interactions” (Deuze, 2015, p. 169). Whereas sociological studies see new media technology through the lens of socio-cultural determinism as a product or extension of social ties (Gane, 2006, p. 33), the sociologist Nicholas Gane asks, in the spirit of this thesis, whether in today’s networked, information society, a fully mediatised society based on speed and on relationships distributed across space and time, sociology fulfils its task if it focuses only on human relationships. The same question is asked by the phenomenologically oriented philosopher of communication Vilém Flusser in his work Do univerza technických obrazů. For Flusser, technical images do not reflect some already existing reality like mirrors, but actively construct new meanings and reality onto “deceptive surfaces”, which propose a way of life to their recipients. This changes the social structure, which classical sociology, starting from the human being, cannot according to Flusser adequately capture; it is not valid for a society at whose centre stand not people but technical images and the relations between the technical image and the human being, which become “the central problem of all future cultural criticism, and all other problems must be grasped from there” (Flusser, 2001, p. 51). Gane therefore suggests that, to understand today’s World of Media, sociology should perhaps focus on “the [interface] between humans and technologies and […] on [its] radically transformative power” (Gane, 2006, pp. 32–33).

Shakespeare may once have written that all the world’s a stage. The sociologist Erving Goffman agreed when, in his work translated into Czech as Všichni hrajeme divadlo (Goffman, 1999), he conceived of society through interacting people-actors, who may have various personas backstage but in public (on stage) set up their “front” according to the signals they want to send in a given social situation. Goffman writes that the front is a necessary condition for an interaction to begin, and that once a person has established a front for a given social situation, he tries to undertake such actions as are consistent with his front; those that would threaten it he tries to avoid or otherwise set himself against (Goffman, 2016). According to Goffman, the front “becomes institutionalised in terms of the abstract stereotyped expectations to which it gives rise” (Goffman, 1999), which is analogous to the established design patterns Christopher Alexander wrote about. The front fulfils tasks relevant to the given moment, but at the same time it gradually gains in meaning and stability and becomes “a collective representation [and] a fact in its own right” (Goffman, 1999, p. 33). In the age of the internet of things and ubiquitous computing, according to the new media theorists Bolter and Grusin, the world is transforming not so much into a stage as into one big computer interface (Bolter and Grusin, 1999, p. 196). The concept of the front is still valid to a certain extent for analysing interpersonal communication, yet two new changes have appeared on the scene: the human front is now mediated and influenced by technology; and secondly, a new front has appeared in the form of the interface of technologies. The old paradigm may survive, but a new one is needed. As Gane and Flusser wrote, for a new media world filled with technology it is necessary to examine and understand the world “at the interface”, at the point of contact between the social and the technological, to study the reflexive and projecting surface as well as the depth of the technicity of the sociotechnical interface.