Re-mediating the Human: Habits in the Age of Computational Media

This chapter considers the extent to which we can apply the insights of pragmatist and continental philosophers of habit to understand the dynamics of networked and computational media and how they may be re-mediating ‘the human’. If habit is key to processes of social transformation, how, this chapter asks, does it figure in algorithmic dynamics that are altering the very meaning of ‘the social’ – and at what point might the logics of habit meet the limit of their analytical purchase? It argues that attention to habit assemblages remains salient to understanding the unfolding constitution of human nature within emergent media ecologies, but only if we reassess what constitutes ‘habit’ in a social field increasingly organised by media analytics and machine learning – and, in turn, what implications arise for understanding more-than-human sensibility, cognition, agency and experience.