Peter-Paul Verbeek

How to understand the social role of things? In fields like material culture studies, design studies, and philosophy of technology this has been a central question for several decades now. Recent technological developments urge us to expand these frameworks, though. Developments like Ambient Intelligence and the Internet of Things result in an increasingly ‘environmental’ role of things. And developments in social robotics and artificial intelligence are introducing new categories of ‘social things’. In this lecture I will investigate how we can conceptualize these new types of artifacts as ‘social things’. First, I will address how they challenge existing frameworks for understanding human-technology relations. Second, I will argue that the ‘mediation approach’ – which sees things as mediators of agency and perception, rather than being social actors themselves – can offer an insightful framework to understand these new human-thing relations. Third, I will expand this approach toward the mediation of social relations. Drawing upon Merleau-Ponty’s concepts of the ‘chiasm’ (interpersonal relations are based upon reciprocity: touch implies being touched) and the ‘flesh’ (interpersonal relations presuppose a shared corporal reality of our selves), I will develop an expanded ‘postphenomenological’ account of the social dimension of materiality.