In Understanding Media,
Marshall McLuhan (1964) investigated not how media are used, but how
they act upon and
reshape the perceptional
schemata of humans. Where the difference between reproduction and the
real becomes impossible to
identify – be it through
advanced computer simulation or, more fundamentally, through the
increased familiarity with sign
systems in the shape of
decision support systems, bullet point landscapes, or exaggerated
marketing messages – any sense for
what Benjamin (1936) called an
aesthetic ‘aura’ becomes veiled. McLuhan and Benjamin thus invite us to
consider the ontological
conditioning of media
technologies.
Many organizations have begun to ‘automate’ and
‘informate’ (Zuboff,
1988) certain parts of their
work, but – far from being simple tools for specific ends – media
subliminally impressing their
urgency and import upon us by
shifting the boundary between what is possible and impossible; thinkable
and unthinkable (Kittler,
2006, p. 49). For Benjamin
(1936, p. 230), each technological epoch brought about ‘art forms’ that
aspired to effects that
‘could be fully obtained only
with a changed technical standard’. Early glimpses of what these epochal
changes may mean for
organizations surface in the
cybernetic writings of Herbert Simon, who thinks of organizations in
terms of information: an
inquiry prompts a series of
information gathering processes – Simon describes picking up the phone
– until all necessary
information is collected
(Simon, 1973, p. 272). The histories of media and communication in
organization are certainly a lot
messier, as the work of JoAnne
Yates (1989) has shown.
Information technologies eliminate the
‘distinction
between material
transportation and message transportation’ (Wiener, in: Light, 2006, p.
356), encouraging a focus on organizational
infrastructures and their
materiality. Simon sketches an organizational form related to a
technical standard (the phone),
one that has since evolved to
even more rapid information processing that records, processes and
stores non-human memories,
displacing the former focus on
the division of labour, factorization, or decision making (Simon, 1973,
pp. 273, 278). Inside
computers, Kittler (1991, p.
1) argues, ‘everything becomes a number: quantity without image, sound,
or voice’; and with digital
data flows ‘any medium can be
translated into any other’, so that ultimately ‘a total media link on a
digital base will erase
the very concept of medium’.
Here we find modern technology an ‘ordering revealing’; not merely a
tool in human hands but
‘no merely human doing’
(Heidegger, 1967, p. 19).
With numbers, Kittler argues,
‘everything goes’; a never-ending
switching-over of form without
any need for anchoring in a signified world of materials, agents, or
purposes. The ‘internet
of things’ and ‘ubiquitous
computing’ have exacerbated this state of affairs, with logistical media
such as enterprise software
enabling not only information
transmission, processing and storage but equally the global movement of
people, things and data
(Peters, 2015; Rossiter, 2016;
Cowen, 2014). The organizational power of networked, computational
media here comes to the
fore. Similar processes of
transformation of mere tools into media ecologies enabling human
activity can be observed in the
field of personal informatics,
the algorithmic self and the data-driven life, where professional and
private is no longer
clearly divided (Dow Schull,
2016; Pasquale, 2015). To be sure, the advent of wearable technologies
(particularly tracking
devices) opens up new
questions concerning mediated materiality, links between the biological
self and the organization as
well as issues related to
visibility and transparency.
Provoked by these questions, we
invite contributions
dedicated to digital media
technology’s intimacy with organization. Contributions may draw on a
number of disciplines and
practices: from organization
to media theory, from information technology to philosophy; from
organizational design to communication
studies; and take many forms:
from essay to performance. We invite papers tracing or projecting
technology mediated organizational
realities, histories and
futures. Topics may include but are not limited to: