Individualization amidst disruptive technology

The other papers examine how socially disruptive technologies reshape relations between persons; in this paper I propose to consider how technology shapes the constitution of the persons themselves. Ecological-embodied cognitive science gives reason to doubt that selfhood is an inner achievement. We do not represent a world inside us; we are individualized in a world of practices. Practices are intergenerational processes in which materials get organized by what we do, while in turn organizing us. Becoming a “self” requires learning to attend to such communal organizations as one’s relation to the world expands across development. I explain how, as we learn to engage various such organizations skillfully, we can experience them as “others” responding to us. The self develops as we learn to differentiate our voice as our own within that engagement. Technologies such as conversational AI and recommender-driven platforms supply our communal organizations with voices that are engineered to respond in certain ways to what we do. Developing a self in the age of disruptive technology risks developing one’s own voice in terms of such engineered others. Disruptive technologies thus do not merely implant distorted contents about ourselves in our heads; they are transforming the worldly conditions under which selfhood emerges. 

Part of panel Disruptive Technology and Relational Agency: Therapy, Intimacy, Memory, Trust, and Individualization - part 2