Thinking Otherwise: Philosophy, Communication, Technology (review)

Thumbs up? Or thumbs down? How does one sum up the review of a book like David J. Gunkel’s Thinking Otherwise: Philosophy, Communication, Technology? If the arguments Gunkel forwards in his series of essays on the discursive logics surrounding new media technologies are persuasive, a thumbs up/thumbs down approach may be misguided. In looking at new media discourses and unveiling some of the assumptions and histories behind them, Gunkel aims to dislodge the entrenched, dichotomous terms used to discuss new media technologies and how they shape our experience of the world. Although unwilling to dismiss these binaries completely, Gunkel hopes that rendering them transparent will open up new possibilities for how we conceptualize and ultimately deploy digital technologies.

In chapter 1, Gunkel adeptly observes that information computing technologies not only function via the binary digits, 0 and 1, but also that their reception and evaluation have been characterized in binary terms as well. New media have typically been welcomed with excited optimism or rejected under suspicious pessimism. These discourses have grounded popular and academic approaches to new media in a way that Gunkel perceives to be problematic. He stresses the importance of questioning these conventional binary discursive logics of new media in order to enhance critique, challenge traditions, and consider ethics.

Gunkel’s astute questioning continues throughout the rest of his work. In chapter 2, he engages discourses about the apparent end of the book. Where others have invoked a binary logic in attempting to assess whether this development is good or bad, Gunkel considers the different question of why so many books on new media explicitly or implicitly address the issue of their materiality. He looks to how these printed materials have dealt with their paradoxical nature by differentiating a material written signifier, the book itself, from the deferred signified, that to which the book refers. This ‘solution’ generates the Derridean problem of a chain of endless signification that only allows for an indirect engagement with new media technology. Gunkel also argues that this question points to the discursive construction of new media in other media in that what we understand about new media will always already be framed in and by discourses in print, film, television, and everyday conversation. This argument necessarily renders thinking about new media self-reflexive in that we cannot escape the chain of endless signification or the discourses that inform our encounter with them.

Gunkel’s third chapter focuses on how binary logics cloud understandings of the new media landscape, those implicated in the familiar notion of the “digital divide.” In critiquing the term for its oversimplification, reductionism and the way it entrenches certain power structures, he suggests that we cannot escape its inherent binary form, but must learn “how to use it to question its own limits and exigencies” (73). Gunkel intelligently perceives that unstated technological determinist assumptions undergird discussions of the digital divide, assumptions that should be challenged by theories of social construction and volunteerism alongside historical evidence of the reception and adoption of new technologies.

Chapters 4 and 5 continue the critique of binary structures by using the science fiction film The Matrix as a backdrop for considering why escape into electronic media has been compared to hallucinogenic drug use. Gunkel cites recent examples of authors who have made this connection before going back to Plato’s Phaedrus and explaining how Phaedrus initially offered Socrates the pharmakon, or drug of a book, to lure him out of the city. Gunkel sees Plato noting that the medicine and narcotic that is writing has the capacity to create positive and negative effects, but more importantly for Gunkel, enforces the binary of truth and reality as good versus falsity and appearances as bad. These assumptions have been uncritically subsumed within contemporary discussions of the value and use of information computing technologies, assumptions that find expression in Neo’s choice of the red pill in the initial stages of The Matrix trilogy.

Gunkel’s first five chapters raise some considerably interesting questions, but his final chapter may...