Cyborg Modes of Agency: Affordances of Automation and Modelling

Abstract

This chapter investigates the ways in which digital technologies are implicated in the ways in which we conceive of INITIATING directed action in and on public space. Digital technologies afford the automatization of processes and the abdication of initiative and action to algorithmic agents. Locative games superimpose their “game logic” onto the spatial and semiotic geography of physical cities and the motivational patterns that influence public behavior, cultivating modes of automatized public behavior that affects the behavioral norms of public life. Digital technologies are also increasingly involved in the processes by which we generate our cognitive models of the urban environment and, therefore, in the ways in which we conceive of imperatives for action.