Abstract
AbstractMany digital technologies, designed and controlled by intensive data-driven corporate platforms, have become ubiquitous for many of our daily activities. This has raised political and ethical concerns over how they might be threatening our personal autonomy. However, not much philosophical attention has been paid to the specific role that their hyper-designed (sensorimotor) interfaces play in this regard. In this paper, we aim to offer a novel framework that can ground personal autonomy on sensorimotor interaction and, from there, directly address how technological design affects personal autonomy. To do this, we will draw from enactive sensorimotor approaches to cognition, focusing on the central notion of habits, understood as sensorimotor schemes that, in networked relations, give rise to sensorimotor agency. Starting from sensorimotor agency as a basis for more complex forms of personal autonomy, our approach gives us grounds to analyse our relationship with technology (in general) and to distinguish between autonomy-enhancing and autonomy-diminishing technologies. We argue that, by favouring/obstructing the enactment of certain (networks of) habits over others, technologies can directly act upon our personal autonomy, locally and globally. With this in mind, we then discuss how current digital technologies are often being designed to be autonomy-diminishing (as is the case of “dark patterns” in design), and sketch some ideas on how to build more autonomy-enhancing digital technologies.
Funder
Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación
Eusko Jaurlaritza
Diputación Foral de Gipuzkoa
Universidad del País Vasco
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Subject
History and Philosophy of Science,Philosophy
Reference117 articles.
1. Aagaard, J. (2015). Drawn to distraction: A qualitative study of off-task use of educational technology. Computers & Education, 87, 90–97. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2015.03.010
2. Agudo, U., & Liberal, K. G. (2022). La Automatización Paternalista. Biko INSIGHTS, 5, 5–13. Retrieved June 1, 2023, from https://www.biko2.com/insights/BIKO-INSIGHTS-5-2022.pdf
3. Airoldi, M. (2021). Machine Habitus: Toward a sociology of algorithms. John Wiley & Sons.
4. Allcott, H., Gentzkow, M., & Song, L. (2022). Digital addiction (Working Paper No. 28936
5. NBER Working Papers). National Bureau of Economic Research. Retrieved March 21, 2023, from https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.2021086