- Lee, Kwang-Suk is associate professor in the Graduate School of Public Policy and Information Technology at Seoul Nat... moreLee, Kwang-Suk is associate professor in the Graduate School of Public Policy and Information Technology at Seoul National University of Science and Technology, Seoul, South Korea. His research areas include critical theories of technology, platform capitalism, the commons, anthropocene, and tactical media. He is the author of several books, Against Techno-Fetishism (Seoul, 2020), Data Aesthetics in Society (Seoul, 2017), Rethinking the Datafied Society (Seoul, 2017), Aesthetic Notes from the Edge: Art Activism Responding to a Social Crisis (Seoul, 2016), New Art Activism: The Cultural Politics in the Era of Post-media (Seoul, 2015), Digital Barbarism (Seoul, 2014) IT development in Korea: A Broadband Nirvana? (London: Routledge, 2012) and othersedit
This study considers AI anthropomorphism as a powerful component and mechanism of today’s AI technomyth. This paper critically analyzes the chatbot Iruda as a case from a constructivist perspective that reveals the ways in which this... more
This study considers AI anthropomorphism as a powerful component and mechanism of today’s AI technomyth. This paper critically analyzes the chatbot Iruda as a case from a constructivist perspective that reveals the ways in which this technological myth has been created and reproduced. Through the critical analysis of the Iruda case, this study observes that the anthropomorphism of AI tends to reproduce and reinforce the techno-neutralism and tech-fetishism of AI by separating the dual aspects of its technological engineering and technological culture. However, the anthropomorphisation of AI cannot be reduced to the strategic intentions of developers or specific actors, but, is a network effect that involves multiple actors (or actants) within the social debate. Today, the logic of intelligent information technology has taken on the appearance of independent and autonomous artificial objects in close relation to the myth of ‘human-like AI’. Specifically, the chatbot technology used in Iruda, despite being co-constituted by a hybrid network of AI, the technology itself, developers, government regulators, and society (anonymous AI users), paradoxically contributes to the techno-myth of AI sublime by concealing its relational aspects through the logic of “human-like AI"(anthropomorphism). This study intends to refute the replacement in which the problematic nature of the socially multilayered entanglement of AI is reduced to the problem of solving technological defects or flaws in a narrow sense. For doing that, this study critically explores the anthropomorphic processes of AI that are mobilized to reinforce technological determinism: persona (the first anthropomorphism), sexual objectification (the second anthropomorphism), childlike-ness (the third anthropomorphism), and finally the Personal Information Protection Commissioner’s policy intervention into the case of Iruda.
Research Interests: Artificial Intelligence, Critical Theory of Technology, Constructivism, Sociology Of Technology (Science And Technology Studies), Sociology of Science, and 10 moreSociology of Technology, Social Constructionism/ Constructivism, Gender and Technoscience, Actor-Network-Theory, Anthropomorphism, Cultural Studies of Technology, science and technology studies (STS), Chatbot, STS/ANT, and sociology of AI
This article sets the context for this special themed issue on the ‘Korean digital wave’ by considering the symbiotic relationship between digital technologies, their techniques and practices, their uses and the affordances they provide,... more
This article sets the context for this special themed issue on the ‘Korean digital wave’ by considering the symbiotic relationship between digital technologies, their techniques and practices, their uses and the affordances they provide, and Korea's ‘compressed modernity’ and swift industrialisation. It underscores the importance of interrogating a range of groundbreaking developments and innovations within Korea's digital mediascapes, and its creative and cultural industries, in order to gain a complex understanding of one of Australia's most significant export markets and trading partners. Given the financial and political commitment in Australia to a high-speed broadband network that aims to stimulate economic and cultural activity, recent technological developments in Korea, and the double-edged role played by government policy in shaping the ‘Korean digital wave’, merit close attention from media and communications scholars.
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... enter-prises), global fluids are autopoietic, rhizomatic and decentralized (as in world money, automobility ... that Urry (2005: 249) describes globaliz-ation as 'pools of order that heighten ... Thesenew approaches... more
... enter-prises), global fluids are autopoietic, rhizomatic and decentralized (as in world money, automobility ... that Urry (2005: 249) describes globaliz-ation as 'pools of order that heighten ... Thesenew approaches to the new, intertwined dynamics of the globallocal nexus revive the ...
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This study investigates the realistic conditions of ‘digital Korea’, especially as they are exemplified by the Samsung SDI scandal in South Korea. Samsung SDI, the world's largest plasma TV maker and a subsidiary of the Samsung Group,... more
This study investigates the realistic conditions of ‘digital Korea’, especially as they are exemplified by the Samsung SDI scandal in South Korea. Samsung SDI, the world's largest plasma TV maker and a subsidiary of the Samsung Group, has fallen under suspicion due to using illegally cloned mobile phones to track the location data of some activist workers who tried to organise a union. The study stresses that this example of mobile tracking represents the shady side of mobile phone use created by management's excessive desire for labour control, and confirms that mobile tracking techniques make possible the spatial expansion of the scope of power. The spatial vocabulary of power is not totalitarian, but dispersed and nomadic in action, and resides in the space of ‘flows’ constructed by electronic impulses. This study discloses that, for private corporations, mobile tracking facilitates a form of efficient, invisible labour control over ‘targeted’ workers, even outside the wo...