I was reading the French news. The first page there was a title which read « en direct : la guerre en Ukraine », of course nowadays nobody bats an eyelid when they see that kind of title in a newspaper. We have come to see the direct reporting of wars, atrocities, tragedies or death as a completely natural phenomenon. But if you sit for a second and reflect upon this very simple title, you open a whole new way to understand our civilisation.
Browsing the titles in the French press spurred a reflection about how in just one century, our media have moved from the certainty of modernity to a post-modern world of radical contextualisation. Hundred years ago, mainstream valid knowledge was scientific, linear, and absolutistic (I say “mainstream” because of course Quantum Physics opened a whole new realm in terms of ways of knowing, but the science that was taught in schools was still newtonian). I say this in the sense of Clare Graves level four (blue level), there was one truth. Today we have opened to diversity in such a way that we have gone to the other extreme. Anything goes. The notions of right and wrong have been fully turned into contextual assessments. At the peak of modernity’s trust and faith in the so-called scientific method, which in fact was really a mechanistic worldview and a belief in positivism, the world was a simple aggregation of cause and effect. In this context of course, it became necessary to counterbalance with post-modernity, the view that things were not so straightforward (to put it simply) and that context actually played a major role in the complexity of life. Today we have moved to the other extreme, when universal laws don’t exist anymore. Moving into the extreme of post-modernity has led to the tribalisation of societies, and social platforms largely contributed to this phenomenon.
I was also thinking about the vital importance of explaining that we need to become aware of how we frame what we see. What I mean is if we started to really see and experience social platforms not as neutral means of communication or connection but as environments, therefore highly designed architectures, we would probably naturally behave in different ways when we are online. In fact, we can do this as we lead our life online and off-line. Proprioception and phenomenology, i.e. awareness of self and experience (or rather knowing the world through an embodied experience), are tools to help us do this. The awareness of how built environment carry with them a manipulative agenda is the crux of the matter in this case.
I am not using the word manipulative, in a deprecating sense. Design by nature is a manipulative discipline. But manipulation happens at all levels of communication. To live as a social being means to manipulate in one way or another, “manipulate” our environment, “manipulate” others. Understood in the most primal sense of the word (the Latin term “manus” means “hand”), this kind of manipulation can also be called relationship. Manipulation can imply to “manipulate” someone so they take their medicine every day, thereby enabling them to live their life with increased well-being. The question is: what is the intention behind the design, or the architecture, or the manipulation? As I am writing this, I’m thinking that another word for design could be manipulation. Architecture and the architectural choices represent manipulation and the intention behind the manipulation.
So I was thinking that maybe an interesting provocation could be to reflect on the passage from modernity to post-modernity, and how each of us is positioning ourselves in this very long term trend in the evolution of knowledge production. Are we aware of what’s going on; what meaning do we give to what’s happening in the world at the moment?