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In the last chapter I explored what humans encounter when they use a technological artefact and the ways in which that encounter can be shaped by prior experience and embodiment as well as some further evidence for the ways in which technologies can shape other aspects of our cognition and perception. In some ways the argument of the next two chapters is simpler: the artefacts that we experience as technologies are embodiments of knowledge. And this might seem intuitively correct — the more that humans learn the better (for some value of "better") their technologies become. This is certainly true, but it's also not the whole story, or the only story, that I want to tell here about the relationship between technology and knowledge. Technology, particularly as viewed from a postphenomenological perspective, is one of the fundamental relationships that we can have with the world, and as such it necessarily opens up questions about knowledge and what it means to know. Much as with the word "technology," however, "knowledge" is a messy term which needs to be pinned down before it can be discussed, and because we are investigating material encounters, we also need to work out the relationship between the knowledge stored in things in the world and those who encounter that world — this requires a theory of both "information" and "data." I want to argue that not only does an understanding of technology require an understanding of such fundamental epistemological questions, but that the technological encounter that I've described can also give us an approach to how we come to know.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137377869_5

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