Digital Affordances and the Liminal
Document Type
Book Chapter
Publication Date
2021
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003052678-7
Abstract
The idea that the technologies one uses and the work experiences one has influence cognition is old, but somewhat vague, focused on how technology induced generalisable habits of mind. Technology creates a familiar world, which changes in large and small shocks, rather than in rational steps. This kind of change, at the tacit level, has characteristics of liminality. Cognitive science provides a vocabulary for discussing this problem that connects with several different strands of social theory, and points to various ways of conceptualising the effects of digitalisation. If we focus on the tacitisation of skilled performance, we can see how the familiar is created and recreated, and identify processes by which this occurs, specifically pattern recognition in a liminal or liminoid state. In the past, and in the classic anthropology of the liminal, the familiar consisted of a world of common or shared objects, and the liminal states involved sacred ones. In the digital world, the choice of experience is voluntary, and the worlds are diverse, but the effects of object-induced involuntary pattern recognition are the same: they organise and reorganise cognition at a tacit, non-discursive, level.
Was this content written or created while at USF?
Yes
Citation / Publisher Attribution
Digital Affordances and the Liminal, in P. O'Connor & M. I. Benţa (Eds.), The Technologisation of the Social: A Political Anthropology of the Digital Machine, Routledge, p. 98-111
Scholar Commons Citation
Turner, Stephen, "Digital Affordances and the Liminal" (2021). Philosophy Faculty Publications. 355.
https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/phi_facpub/355
