Connectivity, Invisibility, Awareness, and Agency

Katrin Etzrodt and Sven Engesser (2019) have been looking at ubiquitous tools, connected things and intelligent agents (link).

Their paper seeks to disentangle the terminology used in discussions of ubiquity. They suggest theoretically disentangling terminology “results in four distinct analytical dimensions (connectivity, invisibility, awareness, and agency) that facilitate and address social implications”.

I enjoyed their discussion of these four concepts and thought they spoke to the discussions we are having about connections in a digital age.

Karen and Sven visualise their disentanglement in Figure 1 in their paper:

They note that in this Figure these dimensions are assigned “to two super-dimensions — connectivity and invisibility deal with aspects of integration, while awareness and agency are concerned with intelligence issues”. They propose that integration “focuses on natural interaction between humans and computers, which is accomplished through invisible technological components and wireless connection”.

Photo Credit

Vivaan Trivedii on Unsplash

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