Postphenomenology and Imaging: How to Read Technology

(Hardback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

How should we understand the experience of encountering and interpreting images What are their roles in science and medicine How do they shape everyday life Postphenomenology and Imaging: How to Read Technology brings together scholars from multiple disciplines to investigate these questions. The contributors make use of the postphenomenological philosophical perspective, applying its distinctive ideas to the study of how images are experienced. These essays offer both philosophical analysis of our conception of images and empirical studies of imaging practice. The contributors analyze concrete examples from a variety of fields of science and medicine, including radiology, neuroscience, cytology, physics, remote sensing, and space science. They also include examples of imaging in everyday life, from smartphone apps to animated GIFs. Edited by Samantha J. Fried and Robert Rosenberger, this collection includes an extensive primer chapter introducing and expanding the postphenomenological account of imaging, as well as a set of short pieces by critical respondents: prominent scholars who may not self-identify as doing postphenomenology but whose adjacent work is illuminating.

Reviews

"Samantha J. Fried and Robert Rosenberger have put together a volume that I will reference for years to come. Imaging is a topic that is evergreen in reflection on science and technology--and how we rely on visualized data and imagery more broadly in the world every day. This volume represents the best of new work on the topic within philosophy of technology and STS. Imaging is never just imaging, and the volume's contributors make this fact clear, offering accounts of multistability, embodiment, classification, and sociality that accompany the visualization we do. I love how the volume includes both authors working within the postphenomenological tradition and those critical respondents from outside of the subfield. A strength of this volume is its breadth of cases and types of visualization--from satellites to cells to hook-up apps--as well as the in-depth treatment given in each chapter by the authors. I look forward to assigning these essays in my philosophy of technology classes."

Author Bio

Samantha J. Fried is director of the Civic Studies Program at the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts University.

Robert Rosenberger is associate professor of philosophy at the Georgia Institute of Technology in the School of Public Policy.