I’ve always liked how Noortje Marres (in Material Participation) links the familiar argument from the philosophy of technology, that the failures of technology render them newly legible, to the ethnomethodological observation that breaking routines invites actors to account for them:
According to ethnomethodologists, the disruption of everyday routines generates insights into social life insofar as it invites or compels social actors to account for these routines: in the words of ethnomethodologists, disruption ‘render[s] everyday habits and settings visible-reportable-and accountable for practical purposes’ (Filmer, 2003; Garfinkel, 1984 (1967)). A similar dynamic has been foregrounded by sociologists and philosophers of technology, from Martin Heidegger to Bruno Latour: they too have argued that the breakdown of established material, social and technological arrangements renders the elements composing these arrangements visible and thereby analysable (Harman, 2002; Latour, 2005a).
The use of ‘invites or compels’ is ambiguous in the extract above. From her other work I imagine Noortje probably sees this as something like a spectrum, with the degree of force varying under different circumstances. In the case of sociotechnical change (rather than breakdown) I think it is very much a case of invites.
This is what is happening now with the incorporation of generative AI into knowledge production. It provides an invitation to reflect on and account for the routines which jointly constitute practices of knowledge production, with doing so providing an opportunity to steer that change in purposeful ways.
Mark Carrigan 