Jared Smith

This article theorizes the interface self: a mode of subjectivity emergent within algorithmically mediated platforms that organize labor, intimacy, and self-presentation. Neither merely expressive nor autonomous, the interface self is shaped through optimization logics, datafication, and feedback-driven design and use. Digital systems such as job platforms, dating apps, and social media increasingly co-constitute users as legible profiles, privileging metrics, preferences, and performative visibility. While often framed as empowering, this dynamic enacts new modes of soft coercion that aestheticize recognition, gamify selfworth, and disarticulate agency from narrative coherence. To analyze this condition, the article first revisits Michel Foucault's theory of disciplinary power and its transformation under the regime of digital modulation. It then employs Andrew Feenberg's theory of instrumentalization to reveal the political and technical structuring of platforms, and draws on postphenomenological thinkers such as Don Ihde, Peter-Paul Verbeek, and Asle Kiran to explore the layered textures of technological mediation. Finally, it turns to posthumanist theorists, including Rosi Braidotti, Donna Haraway, and Karen Barad, to refigure the interface self not as a loss of authenticity, but as a situated, relational becoming within socio-technical ecologies. Rather than seeking escape or transcendence, the article proposes a posthuman praxis of "dwelling within and against" the interface-cultivating opacity, ethical friction, and collective refusal from within systems designed to optimize and predict. The interface self, it argues, marks not the disappearance of the subject but its reconfiguration at a contemporary threshold.

This analysis uses a postphenomenological lens to provide insight into the shift occurring within society at large. It focuses on the educational domain, and arguing for a reevaluation of instructive approaches. Philosophical research into technology and education is seemingly lacking, and so this article seeks to fill the present gaps. This analysis initially delves into the postphenomenological frameworks of technological mediation, intentionality, and dimensions, to clearly differentiate the embodiment and cybernetic relationships as they are understood within various texts. Following this the epistemic and practical dimensions of these relations are explored to then be juxtaposed with the descriptive argument of the overall cultivating cybernetic relationship between human user and technological artefact in contemporary times, using the smartphone as the core example case study. Finally, a normative argument is made considering the previous cybernetic insight, in that if the classroom setting is to evolve and adapt, it too must embed technology within the classroom, lessons, and overall educational engagement. It represents an equalizing technological balance of cybernetic student and immersive classroom where the intentionality of user, technology, and classroom blend together to continue the cultivation of our blossoming relationship with technology.