Dispositives of Trust

In our paper we would like to have a look at a number of examples from different moments in media history from the late 19th century until today, in order to address a phenomenon that creates something like a continuous déjà vu when looking at the reception practices of emerging visual media technologies since the 19th century. One common denominator of these technologies is the fact that the images they produce are automatised, and that the automatisation is the very basis for our at least relative trust in them, be it the photochemical process through which a photograph is produced, or the functioning of an algorithm. These media technologies tend, on the one hand, to yield promises and maybe even utopian expectations as to the way in which they are able to produce reliable, trustworthy, accurate representations of the real that will make possible a number of seemingly revolutionary new practices. On the other hand there is not only a corresponding negative reaction of dystopian fears pointing towards the threats such technologies represent, but also, and maybe more importantly, a scepticism that rapidly starts interrogating the utopian claims. The debates that ensue, foreground certain functions of a medium and try to negotiate the conditions under which a media dispositif of trust can be established. By this we mean the kind of everyday functioning of a medium that requires a certain amount of trust in the configuration of technological, institutional, and textual practices that we take to be “the medium”, and that allows us to use it without having to continually question whether or not we fall victim to its flaws. These debates involve, furthermore, something like an expert culture of professional practitioners, theorists, users and others that address both the potentials and the limits of the medium, articulating the tensions between ideal conceptualisations and practical limitations that finally constitute the fundamental trust that governs as some kind of a default value our everyday media practice.

In what follows we would like to look at a number of historical and contemporary examples that will help us to identify some of the central issues of these tensions, the negotiation of which, in the end is what we might call media literacy in its most basic form: an understanding of the medium not as a black box, but as a process of translation in the course of which “input” is processed in order to produce an “output” – a technical image.