Invocational Media: Reconceptualising the Computer

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Invocational Media critiques the sociotechnical power of digital technologies by introducing the concept of invocational media. What is an invocation Ask your voice assistant and it will define it for you. It is a media artefact that responds to many invocations such as seeking the weather forecast, requesting any song you can name, or turning on the lights, almost magically. This contemporary manifestation of the ancient practice of invocation gives an immediate response to your call in a way that Chris Chesher argues is the characteristic power of all computers, which he redefines as invocational media. This book challenges the foundations of computer science by offering invocation as a powerful new way of conceptualising digital technologies. Drawing on media philosophy, Deleuze, Guattari, Heidegger, Latour, Austin, Innis and McLuhan, it critiques the representationalism of data processing, artificial intelligence and virtual reality. Invocational media seem to empower individuals, but necessarily subject users to corporate and government monopolies of invocation. They offer many solutions, but only by reducing everything to the same kind of act. They complicate agency in their indifference as to whether invokers are human or non-human. With robotics they invoke material form to act physically and autonomously. People willingly make themselves invocable to surveillance and control by creating their own profiles and marking themselves with biometrics. This ground-breaking book will change how you think about digital media by showing they are, in fact, invocational media.

Reviews

Turning away from computational media as digital and instead theorizing computers through their capacity to invoke, to call things up and respond, Chris Cheshers Invocational Media provides a staggeringly original perspective on technology that thrillingly reimagines almost all foundations of digital culture. * Grant Bollmer, Associate Professor of Media Studies, NC State University, USA *
In a time where we are all mesmerized by the magic of ChatGPT and similar AI technologies, Chris Cheshers book is highly welcomed and timely. Using the concept of invocation and engaging with a wide range of relevant media philosophy, Invocational Media offers an interesting and highly original way to theorize how we design, experience and interact with digital technologies and, more precisely, how they design us. This is an important contribution to the philosophy of media and compulsory reading for everyone puzzled by the mystery of contemporary AI. * Mark Coeckelbergh, Professor of Philosophy of Media and Technology at the University of Vienna, Austria *
Just at the moment when the interactive interface is newly ascendant and we thought that all had been said, along comes this gift of a book. Thinking with the generative trope of invocational media, Chesher refigures the power and limits of computation. Invocational Media offers a history of the present of human-computer interaction, and a proposal for how we can rearticulate its future. It will be of interest to anyone engaged with the invocations, avocations and evocations that comprise relations at and through the interface. * Lucy Suchman, Professor Emerita of Sociology, Lancaster University, UK *

Author Bio

Chris Chesher is Senior Lecturer in Digital Cultures in the Department of Media and Communications at the University of Sydney, Australia, who teaches and researches at the intersection of digital technologies and culture. He has published widely on internet cultures, virtual reality, mobile media, computer games, digital toys, and robotics.