Abstract
With the digitalization of most areas of human life and the expansion of quantitative measurements, primacy is increasingly given to knowledge arising from “Big Data” processes. Both the mechanisms and the ideology supporting machine cognition rely on principles alien to Design’s tacit ways of knowing (human cognition), bringing a critical shift in how our worlds are designed. Reification, the process of turning abstractions into things, participates in the creation of knowledge and reveals a profound dichotomy. By turning abstract ideas into code, machines operate a process of reverse reification, making the world utterly inexplicable to humans. This paper critically examines the mechanisms behind machine cognition, how quantified knowledge impacts design’s qualitative understanding and practices and proposes a relational approach to ways of knowing in order to bridge this gap. To illustrate this argument, a three-angled exploration of found images, from the human, machine and the relational cognition is presented.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
Metadata, originally called “breadcrumbs” to reflect the peripheral nature of the information left behind by users during search, acquired gold mine status in less than 20 years as the ultimate (but fallacious) evidence of humans’ essential traits and tendencies.
References
Andrejevic, M., Gates, K.: Big data surveillance: introduction. Surveill. Soc. 12(2), 185–196 (2014)
Beaudouin-Lafon, M., Mackay, W.E.: Reification, polymorphism and reuse: three principles for designing visual interfaces. In: Proceedings of the working conference on Advanced visual interfaces, pp. 102–109 (2000)
Benjamin, A.: Towards a Relational Ontology: Philosophy’s Other Possibility. Suny Press (2015)
Benjamin, W.: The Arcades Project. Harvard University Press (1999)
Berry, D.M.: Critical Theory and the Digital. Bloomsbury Publishing, USA (2015)
Bowker, G.C., Star, S.L.: Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences. The MIT Press (2000). https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/6352.001.0001
Cheney-Lippold, J.: We are Data: Algorithms and the Making of Our Digital Selves. NYU Press (2017). https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1gk0941
Cooren, F.: Materializing communication: making the case for a relational ontology. J. Commun. 68(2), 278–288 (2018)
Cross, K.: The lost of found photography. Photographies 8(1), 43–62 (2015)
Cross, N.: Designerly Ways of Knowing. Springer, London (2006)
Cukier, K., Mayer-Schoenberger, V.: The rise of big data: how it’s changing the way we think about the world. Foreign Aff. 92, 28 (2013)
Flusser, V.: Towards a Philosophy of Photography. Reaktion Books (2000)
Gitelman, L.: Raw data is an oxymoron. MIT Press (2013)
Haggerty, K., Ericson, R. (eds.): The New Politics of Surveillance and Visibility. University of Toronto Press (2005). https://doi.org/10.3138/9781442681880
Held, D.: Introduction to Critical Theory: Horkheimer to Habermas. University of California Press (1980). https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520341272
Helmond, A.: The Platformization of the Web: Making Web Data Platform Ready. Social Media + Society 1(2), 205630511560308 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305115603080
Kennedy, H., Poell, T., van Dijck, J.: Introduction: special issue on data and agency. Data Soc. 2(2), 1–7 (2015)
Latour, B.: An Inquiry into Modes of Existence. Harvard University Press (2013)
Mau, S.: The Metric Society: On the Quantification of the Social. John Wiley and Sons (2019)
Mau, S.: Numbers matter! the society of indicators, scores and ratings. Int. Stud. Sociol. Educ. 29(1–2), 19–37 (2020)
McLuhan, M 1994, Understanding media: The extensions of man, MIT press
Mitchell, W.T.: What do pictures want?: The lives and loves of images. University of Chicago Press (2005)
O’Neil, C.: Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy, Broadway Books (2017)
Palmer, D.: Photography and Collaboration: From Conceptual Art to Crowdsourcing (2017)
Pasternak, G.: Politics and Photography. In: Pasternak, G. (ed.) The Handbook of Photography Studies, pp. 214–234. Routledge (2020). https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003103974-18
Raley, R.: Dataveillance and countervailance, pp. 121–146. Raw Data is an Oxymoron (2013)
Tufekci, Z.: The Real Bias Built In at Facebook. New York Times, 19 May 2016, Opinion, Viewed 4 May 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/19/opinion/the-real-bias-built-in-at-facebook.html (2016)
Van Dijck, J.: Datafication, dataism and dataveillance: big data between scientific paradigm and ideology. Surveill. Soc. 12(2), 197 (2014)
Van Dijck, J., Poell, T.: Understanding Social Media Logic (2013)
Weerkamp, W., De Rijke, M.: Activity prediction: a twitter-based exploration. In: SIGIR Workshop on Time-Aware Information Access, pp. 1–4 (2012)
Zuboff, S.: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, 4th edn. Public Affairs, New York (2019)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.
About this paper
Cite this paper
Liu, H., Miller, M., Gutierrez, L. (2022). Shifting Ways of Knowing in the Digital Age: Contextualising the Found Image Through the Lens of Reverse Reification. In: Bruyns, G., Wei, H. (eds) [ ] With Design: Reinventing Design Modes. IASDR 2021. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-4472-7_12
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-4472-7_12
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Singapore
Print ISBN: 978-981-19-4471-0
Online ISBN: 978-981-19-4472-7
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)