Stacey O. Irwin

In the early days of the Internet, philosophers, consumers, engineers, and futurists wondered what Web 1.0, the initial stage of the world wide web, might look like. At the time, there was not even a space called the world wide web, let alone the moniker “Web 1.0.” As the Internet flourished, consumers were spun into its sticky, silky residue. More connections and devices heralded in Web 2.0, including changes in both the form and the content of digital media. Now, with Web 3.0 right around the corner as we head into the thirtieth year of widespread web use, we explore the digital attitude adopted towards digital media in contemporary society. The idea of an attitude suggests the typical way we are feeling about a certain thing at the time. How do users and consumers and human beings in general assess their digital media use and understanding? Lines blur between where contents and forms begin and end. The digital media “content” needs a device and the “device” needs content to engage the consumer/user. Form comes through technological, electronic, digital, and device driven ways. Content proliferates through media through a variety of user generated programming, visuals, sound, apps, games, TV shows, billboards, and software. The combination of these elements provides digital media with its spreadable and participatory nature. This reflection considers the digital attitude as it relates to the human-technology experience approaching the Web 3.0 era. Does the web+digital+media’s ubiquity highlight or in some way name a new or different kind of in-between and taken-for granted attitude? Ideas from of Don Ihde, Alfred Schutz and Thomas Luckman, Marshall McLuhan, and Peter-Paul Verbeek are considered.

_Postphenomenology and Media: Essays on Human–Media–World Relations_ sheds light on how new, digital media are shaping humans and their world. It does so by using the postphenomenological framework to comprehensively study “human-media relations,” making use of conceptual instruments such as the transparency-opacity distinction, embodiment, multistability, variational analysis, and cultural hermeneutics. This collection outlines central issues of media and mediation theory that can be explored postphenomenologically and showcases research at the cutting edge of philosophy of media and technology. The contributors together enlarge the range of thinking about human-media-world relations in contemporary society, reflecting the interdisciplinary range of this school of thought, and explore, sometimes self-reflexively and sometimes critically, the provocative landscape of postphenomenology and media.

_Postphenomenology and Media: Essays on Human–Media–World Relations_ sheds light on how new, digital media are shaping humans and their world. It does so by using the postphenomenological framework to comprehensively study “human-media relations,” making use of conceptual instruments such as the transparency-opacity distinction, embodiment, multistability, variational analysis, and cultural hermeneutics. This collection outlines central issues of media and mediation theory that can be explored postphenomenologically and showcases research at the cutting edge of philosophy of media and technology. The contributors together enlarge the range of thinking about human-media-world relations in contemporary society, reflecting the interdisciplinary range of this school of thought, and explore, sometimes self-reflexively and sometimes critically, the provocative landscape of postphenomenology and media.

This article explores the concept of animal technics, building on the work of Don Ihde to examine the intricate relationships between technology, animals, and human experiences. Drawing from postphenomenology, philosophy of technology and posthumanist thought, the discussion challenges anthropocentric perspectives that frame technology as a purely human domain. Instead, it argues that animals actively shape and are shaped by technics, engaging with tools, environments, and human-mediated technological systems in complex ways. Through a critical engagement with Ihde’s postphenomenology, the article interrogates the co-constitutive interactions between animal life and technology, revealing how nonhuman agency disrupts traditional boundaries between nature and artifact. Case studies illustrate the diverse ways animals participate in technics, from bioengineered species to digital interfaces designed for nonhuman cognition. This analysis highlights the ethical and epistemological stakes of recognizing animals as technological actors, calling for an expanded framework that accounts for their role in shaping technoscientific realities. By situating animal technics within broader debates in philosophy of technology, this article contributes to ongoing discussions about agency, materiality, ecology, and the limits of human-centered technological narratives. It concludes by advocating for a more inclusive and responsive technological ethics—one that acknowledges the entangled futures of humans, animals, and machines.

Proliferating media forms, from tablets to Twitter, are changing communicative practice, delimiting new experiential horizons, and thus providing phenomenological research with novel variations on the experience of self and other. Videoconferencing via Skype or FaceTime offers prominent examples of these changing forms. Despite the use of these communication technologies in both educational contexts and everyday life, educational videoconferencing has been described in the research literature as “a hidden mode of delivery, employing invisible pedagogical techniques.” In this study I address this situation of simultaneous familiarity, invisibility and uncertainty by focusing particularly on the lived experience of space, the body and eye contact in videoconferencing contexts. This study suggests that the disruption of spatial coherence and power of gaze and mutual gaze are all but unavoidable features of this experience. It concludes by emphasizing the importance forms or expressions of absence, such as the diminution of eye contact, or the importance of not always being perceived as performing or “on” in videoconferencing contexts.

This reflection focuses on lived experience with the Technological Other (Quasi-Other) while pursuing creative video and film activities. In the last decade work in the video and film industries has been transformed through digital manipulation and enhancement brought about by increasingly sophisticated computer technologies. The rules of the craft have not changed but the relationship the artist/editor experiences with these new digital tools has brought about increasingly interesting existential experiences in the creative process. How might this new way of being with technology change the craft and the crafter? Through a phenomenological understanding of Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Don Ihde, and their contributions to the human-technology conversation, this essay moves to reveal the lived experiences of artists/editors who use computers to create by means of film and digital video formats. Exploring notions of lived space, lived body, lived time, and lived relation through the computer interface allows for digging deeper into inhabiting technology and experiencing the Technological Other

The aim of this reflective chapter is twofold: to push against the taken for granted attitude in the lifeworld, to consider the human–technology–world experience, and to highlight some new ways of thinking about the digital environment. Interpreting digital media through the ideas of lightness and heaviness will be a central component of the chapter. This reflection is also paired with ideas from phenomenology and postphenomenology, to reveal themes of what the author calls the “digital attitude.”

Perception and reciprocity are key understandings in the lived experience of driving while using a cellular phone. When I talk on a cell phone while driving, I interpret the world through a variety of technologically mediated perceptions. I interpret the bumps in the road and the bug on the windshield. I perceive the information on the dashboard and the conversation with the Other on the other end of the technological “line” of the phone. This reflection uses hermeneutical phenomenology to address the things themselves in life with which we relate and interact with in our everydayness, as we talk on a cell phone while driving

Philosophical and technoculture studies surrounding the existential understanding of the human–technology–world experience have seen a slow but steady increase that makes a turn to material hermeneutics in the second decade of the twenty-first century (Ihde in Postphenomenology: essays in the postmodern context. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, 1993; Capurro in AI Soc 25(1):35–42, 2010; Romele in Digital hermeneutics: philosophical investigations in new media and technologies. Routledge, Abingdon, 2020; among others). This renewed focus makes sense because human–technology–world experiences need to be interpreted. And many of these are more complicated to study, precisely because technology is at the root of the experiences. One interesting subset of technologies is media technologies, also called digital media, which intertwines the device and the content to mediate together in the world (Irwin in Digital media: human-technology connection. Lexington Books, Lanham, 2016). Visual media technologies and media content, together, through what is called moving image technologies, create virtual role-playing, virtual and augmented reality, video games, and social media focused worlds that have become central experiences in contemporary culture. Just as image-based scientific instruments read the world in different ways, so to do these visual mediated experiences. How might this comingled “reading” of technology explain the digital film language and experience? I contend that understanding the existential “early” film experience helps understand the new age of cinema, with implications for digital media, digital representation of the visual, and technoscience and technoculture studies. The material hermeneutics perspective called postphenomenology is one way to study these visually focused human–technology–world perceptual and interpretive experiences. Don Ihde’s methodological framework (1990, 1993, 1996, 2002, 2010, 2012, 2016, 2019) is both an idea from technoscience studies and a set of nuanced vocabulary that helps to explore and reveal variations, patterns, and trajectories of the whole-body experience of technology. This use case will first explore traditional cinema and then the “new age” term “moving image”, to learn more about this complicated and radically transforming technological experience. Work by Don Ihde and Vivian Sobchack is considered.

Digital Media: Human–Technology Connection examines the technologically textured world through case studies that illustrate the way humans and technology connect with each other and the world. An interdisciplinary array of sources from philosophy, postphenomenology, philosophy of technology, media studies, media ecology, and film studies shows that digital media and its content are not neutral. This technology textures the world in multiple and varied ways that transform human abilities, augment experience, and pattern the world.