“Imagine Never Not Knowing”: An Epistemological Framework for Understanding Negative Knowledge in Augmented Reality

Abstract

Using the apps and devices of Augmented Reality technologies when walking down the street, we are part of epistemological processes in which acquiring information and forming knowledge are involved in visual, aural, and kinesthetic sensations. This paper approaches Augmented Reality in the context of the smart city, considering questions of information materialism related to social epistemology and the phenomenology of the body. Exploring Augmented Reality as an embodied medium rather than a bunch of technologies, the purpose of the paper is to foster a broader look at Augmented Reality, discussing notions of “non-knowing” and “negative knowledge”. Drawing on recent sociological discussions of ignorance, I consider negative knowing as an epistemological phase where “we know that we don’t know”. Karin Knorr Cetina’s notion of liminality offers an epistemological framework to understand how augmented technologies provides contextual information by supplementing or replacing human senses. The paper proposes that the technologies of Augmented Reality promise to bring us new information of our physical world while simultaneously concealing information from us.