9 - Openings
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 December 2024
Summary
We have reached an endpoint. This last chapter is a kind of terminus, but not a boundary. It opens rather than closes the book. It resonates with the truism that every end is a beginning. Therefore, several contrasting considerations will be presented and juxtaposed in an exposition of short stories; some quite concerning, others slightly banal. These can be understood as openings. Here be peculiarities, failures and frictions of practices, operations, and circumstances. A cabinet of curiosities of the commonplace, the odd and sometimes the erroneous. A confession to strangeness, sometimes banal, sometimes intense.
This cabinet is a starting kit, a proposal for the reader to continue to think about and to collect similar examples. Which everyday weirdness is evoked by life with complex technologies and ungraspable techno-economic systems? How is your Mundania manifested? The curious, weird and incongruous is often hidden in the mundane. In that faint background hum. This is a suggestion to further unveil and capture the variations of Mundania. Because it might be in these openings, in the curiosities, that the potential lies. Instead of vanishing points, they can be vantage points to imagine differently, but to also question and scrutinize that which is unfair or outright wrong. The small stories of this cabinet might link to some of the discussions that have already been presented in the book. But here the stories are mostly intended to evoke openings in the shape of further question marks.
The chapter, or this small cabinet, will raise questions and instil more variation. How far can we stretch the Mundania-imaginary? The contrasting examples will point at the ambiguous nature of the variations of Mundania. Or are these examples fractures in the construct? Are these openings? To what? When is Mundania challenged by disruption, and when is mundanization still going on despite malfunctions, frictions, and discontent? What opens and what closes? For whom, how and when? There are variations in how Mundania can be experienced by different people. Uneven and often unfair circumstances. Mundanization is based on a tense interlink between enablement and submission.
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- Information
- MundaniaHow and Where Technologies Are Made Ordinary, pp. 125 - 136Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2024