Higher Seminar in Media and Communication

Countering indifferent systems: Generating reciprocities when the body becomes data.
With Alison Powell and Philipp Seuferling, LSE

How do technologies promised as beneficial become hostile? From smartphones once lauded as efficient personal intermediaries to healthcare AIs promising speed and accuracy but delivering increased workloads and unequal outcomes, the gap between narratives constructed about technologies and their functions is uneven and widening. Narratives of promise, hype and oversell supersede and mismatch with how functionalities of a technology are experienced in real life – enabling situated harms of technological systems to emerge through deceptive narratives that obscure, mischaracterize or ignore functionality.
In this paper, we identify how this mismatch of the articulation between narrative and function enables technologies to become hostile and propose conceptual modes of redress. We argue that the site of the intervention must be not either narratives around or functions and designs of technologies, but the very co-constructive relationship. We understand the mismatch between language and function as a structural unevenness of double articulation. In media studies, the term “double articulation” is used to describe how assemblages of mediation always employ both technological and symbolic resources. The term demands integrated attention to media technologies in their dimension of representation, content and text, and in their dimension of material objects to use, and perform technical functions (Silverstone, 1994). Media studies can be inattentive to the functions and capacities of technologies, while STS can similarly miss the significance symbolic, narrative articulations. Drawing our connective expertise between these two fields identifies the relationship between language and functional capacity as a key aspect of dynamics of technology innovation – and a key site for redressing risks of harmful technology.
When narrative leads and the promises of technology are dis-articulated from their function within social and institutional settings, claims become deceptive and results of the innovations hostile and creating systems of harmful “indifference” (Herzfeld, 1992). In mobilising the concept of double articulation to trace and explain deceptions and hostilities by design, we argue that forms of redress and intervention need to tackle the very relationship, interaction and co-constitution of narrative and technical function (and not either part in isolation). What is needed are both different ways of talking about innovation as well as different ways of designing – and different principles of the relationship between narrative and design.
To carve out potential principles of alternative double articulations, we draw on the cases of Babylon Health and 23andMe. These instances of failure, bankruptcy and breakdown serve to illustrate the consequences of a failed connection between narrative and function. These examples also illustrate how attention to reciprocity could defuse technological hostility by enabling multiple double articulations.
Currently, limited reciprocity between designs, users, and affected persons in many technological systems creates epistemic “amnesia” (Schneider, 2024) which allows hostile technology to proliferate. Our paper offers both a theoretical account of how hostilities by design are enabled and well as how they might be redressed, through an increased attention to the double articulation between narrative and function in technological innovation.


Dr Alison Powell is Associate Professor in the Department of Media and Communications at LSE and serves as Programme Director for the MSc Media and Communications (Data and Society). Alison’s research addresses the discourse, design and context for technologies in the public interest. Past projects have examined values and ethics in technology start-ups, the moral economy of software production, and the roles of citizens in smart cities. Current research focuses on democratic decision-making in data-driven public sector contexts, including in urban planning and health and care. Alison published Undoing Optimization: Civic Action in Smart Cities with Yale University Press in 2021. Alison’s participatory research practice of data walking is widely used in public consultation, teaching, and community research worldwide.

Dr Philipp Seuferling is LSE Fellow in the Department of Media and Communications at LSE. He holds a PhD from Södertörn University, Stockholm. In 2022, he was a visiting researcher at NYU. Philipp’s research focuses on the historical and contemporary intersections of media technologies with migration and border regimes. Tracing imaginaries of “smart borders” he studies how borders are cultural techniques of filtering and differentiation, that are crucial testbeds for digital media at large. He is also working on his monograph, based on his PhD dissertation, entitled “Encampment. A history of media, control, and humanitarianism”.