Deciphering the Design of Digital Technologies. A Challenge for a More Reflexive Digital Culture?

• Published in: Hybrid no. 3
• Main Author: Mabi, Clément
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Presses universitaires de Vincennes 01-12-2016
• Subjects: civic reflexivity; constraint; digital culture; digital governmentality; design
• ISSN: 2276-3538; 2276-3538
• DOI: 10.4000/hybrid.969

In order to follow digital developments in a critical way, it seems essential to contribute to the production of a speech that can summarize power relations regarding digital tools and contribute to raise awareness of the necessity to take a reflexive and critical look on its sociotechnical environment among the citizens. To do so, we propose to open the “black box” of tools, to consider their conception logics in a critical way. Here, technology design is thought as the process that “make a political project become technological” and broadcasts some sort of “digital governmentality.” By focusing on the concrete analysis of technologies, it is necessary to put emphasis on the way they guide, set boundaries and configure practices by defining possibilities of action, which are then more or less updated in use.