The Polysemy of Human-Computer Interaction

This chapter provides exemplars of the influence of digital artifacts upon cultural experiences. We argue that the associations between people and artifacts, and specifically digital artifacts, is an increasingly dense, interwoven, and pivotal aspect of everyday cultural experience. Artifacts themselves resist any stability of meaning by being continuously disassembled and reassembled into newly meaningful assemblages. Digital artifacts extend this complexity by accelerating and extending cultural relationships both temporally and geographically, resulting in a wider range of potential and actual relationships in an expansive number of contexts. Through the connections that digital artifacts hold to people, there is a continuously fluid polysemous multivocality that incorporates the multiple and expansive parameters of power, meaning, and cultural knowledges. The human ability to alter and repurpose artifacts to suit immediate and shifting needs prevents any innate definitional quality from making a “table” a table or a “blog” a blog. Purpose and meaning of an artifact is continuously defined and then redefined between individuals and across time, beyond the reach of the original designers or manufacturers. Things have thus become regarded as texts, structured sign systems whose relationship with each other and the social world is to be decoded. In various poststructural approaches to material forms, the metaphors of language, or discourse, and text have remained dominant in an understanding of things. The new emphasis here has been on polysemy, biographical, historical and cultural shifts in meaning, the active role or “agency” of things in constituting rather than reflecting social realities, power/knowledge relations and the poetics and politics of the process of interpretation itself, that we write things rather than somehow passively read off their meanings independently of our social and political location, values and interests. (Tilley, 2002. p. 23)