Becoming Together and Apart

249 Pages·2016·53.06 MB·English

Becoming Together and Apart
Technoemotions and other posthuman entanglements
Eva Svedmark

Department of Informatics
Umea Centre for Gender Studies,
Graduate School for Gender Studies

Umeå 2016
This work is protected by the Swedish Copyright Legislation (Act 1960:729)
ISBN: 978-91-7601-487-5
ISSN: 1401-4572 RR 16.01
Cover design: Johan Bodén
Cover illustration: Adam Stolterman
Illustrations Act 2: Adam Stolterman
Figures Act 3: Johan Bodén
Photos when not stated othervice: Eva Svedmark
This book is also available in an electronic version at: http://umu.diva-portal.org/
Printed by: Print & Media
Umeå, Sweden 2016
Tandem Musca Cacavit

Table of Contents
Abstract ix
Acknowledgements xi
Playlist xiv
Sammanfattning på svenska xv
Act 1 Setting the scene 1
1. Introduction 3
The story begins 3
Social media 3
Negotiations of social norms 5
Norm-breaking sharing 6
Uncomfortable science 7
Aim(s) and research questions 11
Disposition 12
2. Transdiciplinary foundations 17
“New” Media and the birth of Web 2.0 17
Social media in numbers 18
Sharing as norm 19
Public privacy 20
Technology and the user 22
Designing a future 24
3. Projects involved 27
A variety of material 27
Some words on qualitative methodology 28
Project 1: IT for a Quality of Life 28
v
Project 2: Umea Live 30
Project 3: Sexual Online Exposure Among Youth & Young Adults 33
Project 4: When life hurts 34
Tables of collected data 36
4. Perspectives 41
Being a modest witness with a feminist agenda 41
Me as the Situated Knower 45
Technoscience 47
Feminist Technoscience 47
Posthumanism (and the speaking of things) 49
5. Digital Dirt, Cuts and Choices 53
Finding Sticky Stories 53
Digital Dirt 54
Coming close 56
Making distance 57
Cuts 58
6 Ethics 61
With internet as my arena 62
Researching Life’s Difficulties 64
Potential problems with informed consent 66
Confidentiality requirements 71
Seeing ethics as a process 76
Act 2 Articulating the Phenomenon 79
7. Giving voice to the unheard 81
The limits of writing 83
Narratives and emotions 84
vi
Getting my hands dirty 85
8. Bodies 87
The Sexed Body 89
The Starved Body 92
The Scarred Body 95
9. Emotions 101
Grief 102
Suicide 112
Fear 129
10. The Others 131
Speculators 132
Helpers 134
Lurkers 134
Other others 135
11. Things 137
Software 137
Hardware 139
Anywhere 140
Act 3 Making sense 143
12. Staying with the trouble 145
13. In search of the apparatus 147
Finding a way 148
Moving within entanglements 150
14. Performing feminist technoscience 153
Diffraction as metaphor 154
Diffraction as methodology 156
vii
Touch as onto-epistemology 160
15. TechnoEmotions 163
(dis)Trust 166
(fiction)Truth 170
(dis)Embodiment 174
(eternal)Time 179
… and other Posthuman Entanglements 181
Act 4 The End of a Beginning 185
16. Critical alternatives 187
Reconfiguring the future 188
Hope 193
Epilog 195
References 197
Research Reports 217
Notes 227

viii
Abstract
Social media has in its relatively short existence become a natural
arena for people of all generations to inhabit and live significant
parts of their life. People of all ages are forming personal strategies
for their social media presence and absence and most of us are using
internet not only for information and services but also as social
arenas for sharing experiences of fun and joy, communication and
friend making. What we share and not in social media is slowly
changing and it seams like there is a slow shift in the norms
surrounding what we share and not. This thesis is focusing on the
extreme norm-breaking online sharing by entering material of a kind
that most people never encounter (suicide, self-harm, mental
illness).

Using social media and norm-breaking material as an empirical
touchstone this thesis elaborates, investigates and explores the
entangled relationships between humans and technology in social
media settings. Guided by uncomfortable, emotional and bodily
online sharing the thesis gives voice to stories that are seldom heard,
by people whose lives are rarely spoken of. By exploring the
performative entanglements of/with/through technology, design and
human intent the overall aim is to offer a critical and new
understanding of our online togetherness and posthuman becoming.

The conceptual framework throughout the thesis is based on
posthuman theory and feminist technoscience, two closely connected
theories providing a new onto-epistemological way of understanding
the world’s becoming. The thesis should be seen as the product of an
empirical practice of making theory about digital things, culture,
humans and non-humans. By exploring diffraction and touch as not
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only theoretical standpoints but also hands-on methodology the
thesis contributes to the development of new ways of doing research.

Important findings arising from the practice of diffraction and touch
are Technoemotions – conceptually agents built on a posthuman
understanding of how emotions are entangled between and within
the phenomenon, becoming important agents in the apparatus
creating the phenomenon. Four Technoemotions seem particularly
prominent in the material: Trust, Truth, Time and Embodiment.

The thesis concludes by providing a discussion on critical
alternatives for ethics, politics and power in relation to social media
and the norms and norm-breaking practices most of us participate
in. The responsibility and ability to respond are addressed, as well as
social justice and hope for the future to come.

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