Users

07.12.2012

Users

What was the User? Paraphrasing Foucault’s famous analysis of the author we might ask with what cultural imaginaries the “user function” is still providing us. Is it not an obsolete paradigm in the world of participatory pro-sumer culture?

What was the User? Paraphrasing Foucault’s famous analysis of the author we might ask with what cultural imaginaries the “user function” is still providing us. Is it not an obsolete paradigm in the world of participatory pro-sumer culture? Maybe the question should be whether or not "you believe in Users?”, as Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied have paraphrased the Ram character’s classic line from the film Tron. transmediale 2013 certainly does believe in the persistence of users, and this has consequences for conceptualizing the political composition of network culture. In this thread, we explore the user as one of the most important figures occupying the 21st century cultural landscape: adopting a broad perspective which includes a historical look at user cultures' development in consumer society, in cybernetics as well as the changing roles of the user. Are we all users in the end? Shaping and being shaped by our tools? And if so, what terms may help us navigate and reconstruct this user culture? The user role’s perspective is still pervasive, in spite of media industries telling us that the passive consumer has been turned into an active prod-user. Here, we are looking at how new digital consumer production ambiguously alternates between exploitation and appropriation. Ultimately we are interested in what the user’s cultural position is, has been, and how we might use this knowledge to re-imagine the user.

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