Chapter 3: Designing the Artificial: Balancing the Ego-logical and Ecological Thinking

Media scholar Jonathan Sterne argues that researchers who want to address important and most relevant questions must first “construct” the “objects,” of their inquiries with a fresh perspective. Each time we apply technology in a new way or encounter it in a new context of social practice, we must re-construct it as a new object of study. The first move in our encounter with a novel application of technology must be what Bourdieu and his collaborators called an “epistemological break” with the “common sense” of the existing field (Sterne, 2003, p. 384). Only after the epistemological break is made, are we able to properly construct the new object of study in a way that is more fitting to the new challenges such as those posed by the emergence of an entirely new medium. Exploring new territories often requires a substitution of our desire for certainty with comfort with what Jacques Derrida referred to as aporia. Being in the state of aporia calls for willingness and ability to deal with uncertainty and ambiguity of new and unfamiliar surroundings. It calls for suspended judgment, perspective taking, an ecological scan of all of the relevant premises, and in the case of XR, a fresh reconstruction of immersive media as a new domain and a multirealm object of study. In this exploration I am inspired by Jonathan Sterne’s call to both distinguish what is ordinarily confused and to unite what is ordinarily separated (Sterne, 2003).