Original scientific paper
Media and the Technological Turn: Truth, Power and Resistance
Polona Tratnik
; University of Primorska, Koper, Slovenia
Abstract
The author focuses on two very topical subjects of contemporary humanistic research: media and technology, and discusses the related turns and their correlations. The widespread debate on media testifies to the complexity of this phenomenon and its related issues. Poststructuralists, as well as scholars in cultural and media studies, have acknowledged that the media are never the transparent and neutral interfaces which represent the reality existing out there. The medium is no mediator, but the locus of truth. Whoever operates the medium operates the truth. The author uses the term media turn to refer to this epistemological turn. We are currently witnessing an emergence of the debate on technology. Technology intervenes into the “natural” and develops non-existent systems, thus raising the question of ultimate creativity and divinity, particularly in reference to synthetic biology. The author contemplates the leverage and functioning of contemporary technology and discusses an increasingly influential theory that technology is not subordinated to man, but vice versa: people have become functionaries of technology. The author proposes that this be referred to as the technological turn.
Keywords
media turn; technological turn; synthetic biology; engineering; resistance art; creativity
Hrčak ID:
114780
URI
Publication date:
2.9.2013.
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