Abstract/Summary

In this chapter, I use the stories of self-quantifiers to discuss how technology can affect our study of the humanities, and the way the humanities can offer insights into our encounters with technology. The theoretical framework that will form the basis of this discussion is mediated discourse analysis (Norris and Jones 2005; Scollon 2001), an approach to discourse which focuses on how the semiotic and technological tools we use to interact with the world serve to enable and constrain what we can know, and who we can be. Mediated discourse analysis sees the analysis of texts and technologies as occasions for understanding how human social life is constituted and how it might be constituted differently though the exercise of human agency that can come as a result of a heightened awareness of the mediated nature of our experience of reality.