“How can we ever describe the agency and experience of human beings?” – Gido Broers

Arun Saldanha’s lecture, which was called Stratification of cyberspace: from experience to waste, was for me a step outside of my academic comfort zone. In my own research, I focus mainly on theatre and spectatorship which I am exploring through a cognitive neuroscientific lens. This does not mean that Saldanha did not address interesting and relevant topics. On the contrary, he made, at least for me, surprising connections between different topics, such as geography, racism, technology, and capitalism. Even though I could not entirely follow his main argument – he made a lot of sidesteps – I will touch in this blog upon some of his insights that raised further thoughts.

One of the main things that I noticed in his talk, is that he indirectly spoke a lot about agency and the role of human beings in relation to technology. He mentions questions as for instance: Is change something that can be brought about by human beings? Do we have an active role in globalization? Can we influence the way technology influences us? Can we determine our own experience of spaces? What is the role we perform in sustaining or creating capitalism? And how does capitalism force us to make categories – or puts us in categories – and therefore creating a basis for racial divisions? For me, it was not entirely clear what Saldanha’s exact answers would be to these questions, but at least he seemed to point at the more negative way in which technology affects us and attributes a not so prominent role for human agents in relation to technology. This reminded me of Mark Hansen who states in his book Feed-Forward: On the future of twenty-first century media (2014) that we are that closely connected to media that they cannot be considered separately from human experience. Therefore, as Hansen claims, “we must work to expose the complex networks through which environmental media impact experience and to construct relationships that afford some grasp of, if not indeed some distinct agency over, their operation” (37). I think that this grasping of the network through which experience occurs is similar to what Saldanha tries to achieve with his research. And as he has shown, this is not that easy. I think he even showed that this network of human experience is even more complex than you might expect.

References

• Hansen, Mark. 2014. Feed-Forward: On the future of twenty-first century media. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.