This article reviews recent cognitive and neurological approaches to the study of attention. It argues that such research is based on the notion that attention has a positive cognitive function selecting, like a sieve or a filter, elements from the background and foreground, to then be processed by the brain and made conscious when required. These approaches fail to explain cognitive overload and recent findings demonstrating that recognition and understanding—sensory, visual and semantic—also occur prior to attention. Merleau-Ponty and Freud offer a different model: a negative distractive attention. Negative distractive attention serves as a threshold for stimuli excluded by neurological processes regulating overload and ensuring that consciousness can concentrate on the singularity of its objects. Such approach to attention explains how one can drive and talk. It is not a positive multi-tasking model but a negative distractive one.

Attention has been addressed either as a distinction of a figure from background or as a searchlight scanning of a surface. In both ways, attention is limited to a single object. The aim of this article is to suggest a platform for an interpretation of multi-attention, that is, attention based on a multiplicity of objects and spaces. The article describes how attention can be given to more than one object, based on the experiences of pilots, parents and car drivers.

Perception and reciprocity are key understandings in the lived experience of driving while using a cellular phone. When I talk on a cell phone while driving, I interpret the world through a variety of technologically mediated perceptions. I interpret the bumps in the road and the bug on the windshield. I perceive the information on the dashboard and the conversation with the Other on the other end of the technological “line” of the phone. This reflection uses hermeneutical phenomenology to address the things themselves in life with which we relate and interact with in our everydayness, as we talk on a cell phone while driving.

This article is an exploration of Apple’s iPhone 4 as both a technology and an object of marketing. This analysis looks at the FaceTime app and how its marketing created a visual hand-phone-face Deleuzian assemblage while playing on affective connections of parenthood and long-distance caring labor. This is connected to the ways in which mobile telephony creates divided attention between home and labor and the mobile phone and car while driving. This analysis is especially concerned with technological transparency and how it creates divided attention in the home and in the car.

Digital technologies mediate engagement with the world by making activities visible. The automaticity and physicality of the ways in which they do this suggest that it could be productive to view them as responsive digital materials. This paper explores the structure and function of responsive materials in order to develop a conceptualization of responsive digital materials. It then begins to unpack the complexities of digital material mediation through both drawing on and extending existing postphenomenological theory.

The aim of this article is to develop the concept of a material semiotics’ rhetoric as a way to highlight a rhetoric that is not reducible to the symbolic and communicational domains, and which helps to shed light on the construction of features for mobile technologies such as cell phones. To reach this goal, this research makes an articulation between some main notions defining rhetoric as a knowledge and practice—being persuasive, seeking to reach an audience, the use of arguments, in a context of ambiguity and problematization—and the construction of technological artefacts according to Science, Technology, and Society studies.

Using the work of Jacques Ellul on technique and its development, this paper criticizes the technological risk management discourse, which claims that risks are “managed” within reasonable limits. In fact, the inevitability of technological change and the uncertainty associated with technology-induced environmental risks, some of which are still totally unknown, undermine the very possibility of democratic governance of risk. Our reliance on technique and the common belief in its infallibility make it particularly arduous to the follow the path showed by Ellul.

This essay examines three competing views of technological change, developed at the beginning of the millennium, and their impact on our lives. The discussion will lead to three conclusions. First, we must be involved in decisions about how technology is regulated and used. Second, we should be wary not to consider all technologies as having the same effects. The cell phone is neither the personal computer nor the television, and there is no reason to consider each as having the same potential social consequences. Third, new methodologies must be developed to account for any changes in social relations that come about as a result of our adoption of these technologies. In the final section of the essay, the consequences of contemporary technologies on what it means to be human are briefly discussed. Rather than substitute technology for democracy or big data for the ability to find significant information, we must take democratic control of these technologies and affirm our humanity. Indeed, I argue along with noted commentators on technology that what makes us human is our ability to sort and find relevant information, reflect on our actions and take risks in associating with other humans. These are things that we must always bear in mind if we are to flourish in the information age.

This paper explores the process by which new technologies supplant or constrain cultural scaffolding processes and the consequences thereof. As elaborated by William Wimsatt and James Griesemer, cultural scaffolds support the acquisition of new capabilities by individuals or organizations. When technologies displace scaffolds, those who previously acquired capabilities from them come to rely upon the new technologies to complete tasks they could once accomplish on their own. Therefore, the would-be beneficiaries of those scaffolds are deprived of the agency to exercise the capabilities the scaffolds supported. Evaluating how technologies displace cultural scaffolds can ground philosophical assessments of the cultural value of technologies.

The content ranking system of reddit.com, the English language Internet’s most popular social news website, plays a large but often unnoticed role in shaping what users see and how they think. By pairing informational cascade theory with textual analysis, I argue that the “karma” system elevates particular forms of content over others and generates numerical cues that unconsciously guide users’ judgments about said content and about the world. By drawing on Heidegger’s account of modern technology, I argue that the karma system both symptomatizes and engenders an ontological perspective according to which things in general are taken as available, evaluable, and disposable.

Unlike in the phrase “Virtual Reality,” in the phrase “Augmented Reality” (AR) the stress is put on the word “reality.” It seems, though, that we still lack a concept of reality which can fit the world of both humans and computers. In connection with this philosophical issue, this paper aims to provide the background for a better insight into the meaning of Augmented Reality and its impact on human behavior. My thesis is that an ecological version of direct perception’s realism constitutes the most natural framework from which to start. The ecological approach to perception – namely, the Gibsonian theory of affordances – together with a non-dualistic, pragmatist and evolutionist notion of reality, perfectly fits this purpose. Thus, after a brief survey of the present state of AR technologies, it should become natural to interpret AR digital contents as implementations of affordances.

The digital computational technologies that over the past decades have come to be fully integrated into nearly all aspects of human life have varying forms, scales, interactive mechanisms, functions, configurations, and interconnections. Much of this complexity and associated implications for human experience are, however, hidden by prevalent notions of ‘the computer’ as an object. In this paper, we consider how everyday digital technologies collectively mediate human experience, arguing that these technologies are better understood as fluid assemblages that have as many similarities with the infra-structural as they have properties typical for objects. We characterize these aspects in terms of ‘wicked interactions,’ drawing on and adapting the classic theory of wicked problems in design discourse that has similarly considered the complexity of interactions with and within other types of social infrastructure. In doing this we emphasize the need and the potential for building up connections between philosophy of technology and design discourse, with the hope that this might further the shared goals of understanding digital technologies and their consequences and determining how to act in relation to them and their design.

Throughout his philosophical project Michel Serres uses the etymological connections between words to reveal much larger experiential and philosophical links. One such connection is between the words ‘media’ and ‘milieu’. In this paper I show how Serres’ philosophy of communication can be used to think critically about the relationship between media and the environment. The paper provides an introduction to Serres’ mode of thought, focusing on his treatment of communication systems. It explores his articulation of noise, information, and thermodynamics and what this contributes to critical discussions of media ecology.

With the widespread infusion of online technology there has been an increase in various studies investigating the practices in online communities including also philosophical perspectives. What those debates have in common is that they call for more critical thinking about the theory of online communication. Drawing on Techno-Anthropological research perspectives, our interest is placed on exploring and identifying human interactions and technology in intersectional spaces. This article explores information systems that allow for interchanges of different users. We discuss ontological assumptions that focus on understanding the kind of dialogue that can be captured between different expert groups when they utilize information systems. We present the notion of ‘dialogic’ by Mikhail Bakhtin and contextualize it through an analysis of online dialogue. Dialogic or ‘conversation and inquiry’ is discussed as being mediated through human relationships. Acknowledging the existence of at least two voices the underlying differences between dialogue partners are highlighted.