Kember and Zylinska (2012) — Life After New Media: Mediation as a Vital Process

Rina Chen’s living notebook on digital craft and design.

It’s an excellent read that examines open, emerging quality of technology and media —qualities essential yet I find oftentimes missing in discussions of technology and AI among policymakers, scientists, and engineers.

Key Passages (pp. 14–18)

Originary technicity can thus be understood as a condition of openness to what is not part of the human, of having to depend on alterity— be it in the form of gods, other humans, fire, or utensils— to fully constitute and actualize one’s being. But this imperative to get outside of oneself and to be technical, that is, to bring things forth, to create, is perhaps also an ethical injunction to create well, even if not a condition of ethical behavior. (p.17 ~ 18)

Media “ communicate ” in the sense of always remaining turned toward what is not them, in being a delimitation of the standing reserve of technology that has to be temporarily cut off but that must never be forgotten. Every medium thus carries within itself both the memory of mediation and the loss of mediations never to be actualized.

Heidegger: Technology as Revealing (p. 14)

The essence of technology lies in revealing—the bringing-forth of matter’s potentiality, of “whatever does not yet lie here before us, whatever can look and turn out now one way and now another.”

Reflexivity and Technicity (p. 15)

Through visual and conceptual reflexivity—seeing himself in the blade of flint, committing the tool’s use to memory—humanity emerges as fundamentally intertwined with environmental matter that is not part of the human body.

Prometheus and the Birth of the Technological Human (p. 16)

Prometheus gives tekhnē to humans, completing their creation as technological beings: creators who must nonetheless rely on external elements to actualize their being.
The myth captures the tensions and anxieties of “human becoming” in an ever-changing world.

Originary Technicity as Openness (pp. 17–18)

Originary technicity is an openness to what is not-human—an inherent dependence on alterity (gods, tools, fire, others) to become fully human.
This drive to bring things forth (tekhnē, creation) may also be read as an ethical injunction: not simply to create, but to create well, even if this is not yet fully an ethical system.

Notes on Heidegger, Stiegler, and Technicity

Heidegger’s “The Question Concerning Technology” (p. 14, 21–22)

Modernity reduces technology to an organizational or enframing function, distancing us from more creative, non-instrumental relations to tech.
The original meaning of technology lies in tekhnē and poiēsis: bringing-forth and presencing.
Stiegler expands Heidegger’s concept of originary technicity as being-with and emerging-with technology.
Poiēsis brings the world forth via nature (physis) or the work of artisans/artists.
Contemporary media blur Heidegger’s distinction between:
- “growing things,” and
- things completed “through the crafts and the arts.”
Examples: biomedia, artificial life, social platforms (LiveJournal, Facebook, Flickr).
Here, human creativity intertwines—and is often superseded—by nonhuman forces.

Stiegler’s Technics and Time 1 (pp. 15–18)

Human exteriorization (tools, fire, prostheses) stems from an ancient zoological tendency—already visible in Heidegger.
The modern period shifts the problem: technological speed increases exponentially, outpacing social, cultural, legal, and spiritual development.
Seeing the human as “always already technological” opens the possibility of extending Levinasian ethics to what may be called posthuman agencies. Levinasian ethics: responding to the Other with responsibility, care, and openness.

Media, Mediation, and Technicity (pp. 18–22)

Defining Media

Lev Manovich: new media = internet, multimedia, games, CD-ROMs/DVD, VR.
Lister et al.: new media = communicative and expressive practices emerging from networked digital computing, transforming older media forms.
Lister’s concept of recombination contrasts with Manovich’s substitution

Yet, given that “the content of media is always other media” and that the process of remediation is ongoing, we need to do more to combine our knowledge of media objects with our sense of the mediating process that is continually reinventing them

Mediation as Process

Nick Couldry: “mediation” often refers to the effect of media institutions in saturated societies.
Silverstone’s more nuanced view: mediation is a dialectical process in which institutionalized media circulate symbols in social life.
The authors propose a reversal:
- Mediation is not an effect but the originary process by which media emerge.
- Media are temporary stabilizations—“fixings”—within a continuous technological flow.
- Media remain open to what is not them: each medium delimits a portion of the technological “standing reserve,” never fully closing it.

Mediation “ describes the fundamentally, but unevenly, dialectical process in which institutionalized media of communication (the press, broadcast radio and television, and increasingly the world wide web), are involved in the general circulation of symbols in social life.” (p.20)

Standing Reserve and Media Becoming

Every medium contains:
- Actualized mediations (the specific form a medium takes),
- Unrealized possibilities (paths not taken, mediations that never emerge).
Media “communicate” by always pointing beyond themselves, carrying both:
- the memory of prior mediations, and
- the loss of those that never actualize.