Small Tech: The Culture of Digital Tools

by Byron Hawk, David M. Rieder, and Ollie Oviedo, Editors
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, 2008
Electronic Mediations, Volume 22
272 pp. Trade, $75.00; paper, $25.00
ISBN: 978-0-8166-4977-8; ISBN: 978-0-8166-4978-5.

Reviewed by Jan Baetens

Small Tech is a collection of essays that questions the new relationships between the cultural and the technical layer at the crossroads of new media and aesthetics. As the title announces quite well, the book is very much object-oriented and focuses on all kinds of “small” technological objects like cell phones, iPods, PDA, P2P systems, games, wearable computers, new software for photography, in short items that redefine in a dramatic way the interaction between the human, the interface, and the environment (of which the media ecology is just a part).

The book is divided in three parts, very helpfully introduced by the three editors (an index, however, is missing, and given the very diverse content of the book such a tool would have been more than useful). The first part of the book, which is by far the most challenging one, gathers the more theoretical reflections on the subject. The second part is composed by a set of extremely short contributions, more of the length of a testimony than of a scholarly article, each of them tackling a specific small digital tool. The third part is somewhat a combination of both approaches and brings together traditional articles that are sometimes restricted to the study of one very specific object, while others complete the technical description with a more culturally and critically funded evaluation. The overall methodology, which is of course very interdisciplinary, is more humanist than scientific (however, the technical level of some articles is quite high).

As stated in their introduction, the editors believe that it is now time to abandon the historical dichotomy between “cyberculture studies,” which analyze various social phenomena related to the Internet (a typically American approach, given the rapid spread of the Internet in the US), and “new media studies”, which examine aesthetic and artistic digital products (a more European approach, given the stronger public funding of the art scene in Europe). With the small technological objects and techniques examined in this book, three spaces come together: the virtual space of the Internet, the enclosed space of the installation, the open space of everyday life. Corollarily, several contributors are also quite critical of what they call the “first generation” theory of digital technology, whose often very utopian views on cyberculture and new new media have now become unacceptably dissociated from the social reality (the major target of these critiques is the work by George Landow). Instead, both the editors and many authors make a plea for the specific kind of posthumanism defended by N. Katherine Hayles, which is not a utopianism taking embodiment as its ideal, but a more sober and realistic vision of the connections between the human body and mind, on the one hand, and the artefacts of our culture, on the other hand.

Roughly speaking, all the articles take sides with Hayles against older embodied and deracinated conceptions of the digital turn. Logically, various texts are also very sympathetic to a more phenomenological approach (which the editors identify with Heidegger) as well as to a broad cultural interpretation of technology (McLuhan is frequently quoted in the book). Nevertheless, not all authors manage to take up this challenge. Despite some very interesting contributions (the one by Lev Manovich on mapping and visualization is a good example of it), many do not offer much more than a rather uneventful description of a certain field or a certain object. In many cases that descriptive stance delivers useful insights and ideas, but often the reader is waiting for something more or something else (and he or she may then remember what is said elsewhere on the flaws of the so-called “first generation” texts and theories on cyberculture and new media). It is not that the global focus of this book is unsharp or overly technical or that a critical impulse would be missing, but the step towards a more cultural reading of the artefacts is not always easy to take.