The conference of the research project “Assistive Media”, located at Leuphana University Lüneburg, was opened with each of the project team members presenting central aspects of the conference’s topic, which added up to a remarkably rich account of some of the key assumptions of “Assistive Media” and its general position between the research areas of media studies and disability studies. For someone new to the topic, it is indeed striking, as ANNA-LENA WIECHERN (Lüneburg) pointed out, that the discourse figure “prosthesis”, which has been a key term in media theory since McLuhan’s “Understanding Media”, has remained a rather abstract concept devoid of any intrinsic connection to actual (persons with) disabilities. One of the key texts that addresses that neglect, Mara Mills’ and Jonathan Sterne’s “Dismediation” from 2017, was therefore for a good reason referenced at several occasions during the conference for pointing out that “media scholars have historically referenced disability in symbolic, cliched, or otherwise uninterrogated terms”.1 The concept “assistive media” is set to change this and thus to close the gap between two hitherto rather unrelated fields.

However, this undertaking has its own pitfalls. As JAN MÜGGENBERG (Lüneburg) explained, the term “assistive” (derived from Latin assistere, to stand (near) by someone) has been critiziced by disability scholars for implying dependency as well as for its rather obscure usage – a point of criticism that the conference could not quite eliminate. On the other hand, making the assistive function of certain media explicit can help to address some of the as yet neglected aspects of technology, especially if the concrete setups and situated interactions are being accounted for, including the reflexive question “who is assisting the assistants?”.

As the various examples during the conference showed, it is still mostly, if not exclusively humans who are being assisted in their everyday tasks. Maybe because of this human-centeredness, PHILIPP SANDER (Lüneburg) emphasized that the conference was conceived under an opposite premise. People are not to be seen as the center of their (technical) environments, but rather as the environment for machines. This approach is shared by engineers, programmers and system administrators who conceptualize “users” as “non-machines”. If this approach can indeed be called “non-anthropocentric”, as the organizers would have it, then this decentering of the human is obviously grounded in what could be called a machinocentricity, and it will remain to be seen how far this approach actually carries.

What the organizers made very clear is that the term “assistive media” is not meant as an endorsement of what they call a “medical model” of assistance in the sense that there is a fixed set of disabilities and “deficiencies” that can be compensated by gadgets, devices or other technical contraptions offered as solutions to problems of “patients”. Rather, by following the “social model of disability”2, they stressed that while designed to overcome certain barriers, assistive systems always create new obstacles in the process. The technomedial approach to assistance thus seems to be dialectical in nature, but as this was just hinted at in the conference’s introduction, there seems to be a lot to gain if the project leaders would delve more deeply into this intrinsic ambivalence of their topic in the forthcoming conference proceedings.

Again, this calls for a closer cooperation between media and disability scholars, or rather for an intensified effort from media studies to take into account disability studies’ findings. Considering that some of the most talked about media, like the telephone or the typewriter, were originally developed to compensate for physical or sensory impairments, this should go without saying. “Disability and media are co-constituted”, as the aforementioned text by Mills und Sterne has it, was therefore a recurring statement. It was also quoted by WOLFGANG HAGEN (Lüneburg), who applied it to the history of interfaces like the multi-touch sensor that found worldwide implementation in smartphones. Because these sensors are unreceptive and non-adaptive to intensities of touch, they are seriously limited in their usefulness for persons depending on this sensory function. The dialectics of ability and disability or what could be called the “(dis)enabling function of assistance” is strikingly at work here.

Given the importance of her work on the entanglement of disability and media for the research program, it was a fitting choice to invite MARA MILLS (New York) to deliver the conference’s keynote. In a brilliant overview of original research conducted at the AT&T archives in San Antonio, Texas, Mills chose Claude Shannon’s master’s thesis “A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits” from 1937 as her starting point. This thesis has become famous for its application of Boolean algebra to the problem of how to organize telephony more efficiently, which eventually paved the way for digital computing altogether. Given its widely acknowledged importance, it was indeed surprising to learn how little history has actually been written about it. Mills interpreted Shannon’s contribution – he had served as an intern at Bell Telephone Laboratories while working on his thesis – as a seminal step in the social history of telephony automation that had started almost half a century before.

In a striking parallel to recent debates around stressful and medically harmful couplings of humans and machines, the keynote delved deeply into the working conditions of the predominantly female telephone switch operators from around 1900 until mid-century. Taking recourse to Sarah Rose’s (2017) “No Right to Be Idle. The Invention of Disability, 1840s-1930s”, a book that reconstructs the utilization of the newly invented term “disability” by companies like the Ford Corporation, Mills laid out how Bell Systems developed a hiring process that required job applicants to pass physical and later also psychological tests (provided by Harvard-based psychologist Hugo Münsterberg who also inaugurated Psychotechnics). This was done, in Mills’s words, “to screen disabled people, and people with impairments, out of the workplace” by deeming them incapable of dealing with the stress of the repetitive motions, the constant feeling of being surveilled and the relentless working hours. This hiring policy led to the permanent exclusion of so-called disabled people from the job market.

Telephone switch operating seems to have had such a bad reputation that progressive newspapers printed several investigative journalism pieces, showing how so-called overloading was a constant health threat for operators. With workers’ compensations laws slowly gaining ground, companies like Bell tried to outwit policies by choosing only women who they thought were capable of working under the duress for an extended period of employment. Still, dropout rates remained high, since the ongoing process of mechanization increased the physical and mental demands. Workers who developed symptoms of “overload” took the blame for failing to adapt. Importantly, though, Mills countered techno-deterministic accounts that are still prevalent in media studies with her social historical expertise, by showing that automation was not so much pushed for technical issues, but primarily for managerial ones. It was exactly this economic logic that gave the big impetus for full automation. “Switchboard engineers began unfavorably comparing the breakdown of human operators and their rehabilitation to automated devices in terms of the lifespan and maintenance of automated devices”, said Mills, and this stance obviously paved the way for Shannon’s ideas for streamlining telephone switch design.

In five panels, the idea of media assisting humans in their daily tasks was further explored. Most of the lectures focused on examples of devices or interfaces designed to help employees performing their jobs, like for instance the dead man’s switch explored by MARTIN SIEGLER (Weimar). This contraption ensures the ongoing awareness from a human (engineer, driver, or pilot) while a powered vehicle is in motion, which means that the machine itself needs assistance in order to fulfill its purpose of assisting. Siegler’s concluding point that “assisted attention must be viewed as a relational achievement, resulting from an entanglement or hybridization of human and nonhuman modes of attention”, is something that rings true for most, if not all forms of technomedial assistance, including the reconception of housing as “assistive environments” that was investigated historically by FELIX HÜTTEMANN and MONIQUE MIGGELBRING (Paderborn) from the earliest home computers to the recent discourse around “Ambient Assisted Living”.

Technology designed to assist in construction work received quite a lot of attention, as not less than two talks were concerned with exoskeletons that support workers for tasks that they would not be able to do if they had to rely solely on their unassisted physical power and stamina. ATHANASIOS KARAFILLIDIS (Aachen) described workers wearing exoskeletons as “hybrid sensor-actuator-networks” while pointing out that technical sensors are not necessary for these networks to function, as long as human sensing fulfills the task of integrating the exoskeleton into the body scheme. The question of control seems to be entirely dependent on the human in this case, rendering the term “assistance” more or less obsolete here, which is probably why it can be substituted by the more general term “support”.

YANA BOEVA and ANN-KATHRIN WORTMEIER (Stuttgart) argued that in architecture and construction, the old Cartesian split of mind and body still persists in the dichotomy of cognitive vs. physical assistance. They pointed out that while construction workers get more and more used to accept wearables and exoskeletons to compensate for what is thereby perceived as their all too human weakness, architects are typically reluctant to either use or acknowledge their use of assistive media out of a fear for being perceived as less creative. This division of labor and labor assistance, they concluded, deepens the power imbalance between knowledge and physical work.

The distinction between physical and cognitive or mental assistance proved heuristically helpful. Two lectures clearly dealt with the latter, focusing on meditating and on writing, respectively. PHILIPP HAUSS (Wien) talked about machines that meditate for their users and thereby seem to epitomize the late capitalist hype around wellness. Nevertheless, the history of health and wellness apps goes back at least to cybernetic implementations of biofeedback in the 1960s and 1970s, which were introduced with the promise of fully liberating humans from their habitual limitations. Unsurprisingly, the quantified self-movement found a lot of groundwork here to build on and develop their own version of a thoroughly self-conscious cyborg.

The examples that ROBERT STOCK (Humboldt University Berlin) presented in his talk about assisted writing shifted the emphasis more towards disabilities again by looking into life writing practices of persons with cerebral palsy. Many of them resort both to automated dictation devices and human assistants, thereby underscoring that even in highly automatized environments, the question of assistive media stays intrinsically connected to assistance given by fellow humans.

This is all the more true when dealing with examples from science, as in the case of interactive anatomical brain visualizations investigated by PAULA MUHR (Berlin), as well as health care: DYLAN MULVIN (London) explored the curious case of standardized patient programs which use actors to perform symptoms of illness and disability in the training of physicians. However, the most striking example of the entanglement of technical and human assistance came from BEATE OCHSNER and MARKUS SPÖHRER (Konstanz) who looked into the ambivalences of the Microsoft Adaptive Controller. This device is advertised as a solution for exclusory effects of standardized normative digital gaming controls and actually was developed in cooperation with charity organizations and affected individuals. But for all its merits, the controller was also assessed by the speakers as a strategic tool for the inclusionary politics of a profit-oriented company as well as a device that transforms as yet non-capitalizable subjects into profitable and paying customers and thus as a “node for normalization”.

There was much to take away from the conference: First of all, the above-mentioned neglect of actual disabilities or other(ed) abilities within media studies is something the discipline will need to work on in the future, and the conference’s topic gave a clear indication how this can be done sensibly. It is a timely undertaking, fully in line with the frequent calls for acknowledging human vulnerability, dependence and even neediness. Secondly, thinking through media with the focus on entangled practices and functionalities of assistance promises to cultivate an awareness of one’s own privileges, habitualizations and existing power differentials between different groups of people. At the same time, attributing the term “assistance” to every gadget, device and technology that has some kind of agency will undermine the semantic peculiarity that proved most productive when a certain dialectical relation was investigated. When assistive designs necessarily also create new obstacles, does the obvious question “what constitutes successful assistance” become undecidable altogether? Or is it rather a matter of obligation to also question who or what gets to decide whether an act or medium of assistance is actually helpful? In the line of this thought, one aspect surely would deserve more attention in this context, and that is the obligation, if not coercion to use assistive media for professional, health care or even recreational purposes. In a society that regulates, normalizes and capitalizes more and more areas of existence, the question of enforced assistance arises as an eminently political one, especially for persons who are marginalized in one way or other, whether for being unemployed, formally uneducated, differently abled, sickly, invalid or impaired, or just for not being seen as belonging to the majority group and thus requiring special attention from state institutions and their technological proxies.

Conference overview:

Welcome Note and Introductory Remarks

Panel 1: Assistance and Control
Chair: Karin Harrasser (institution, location)

Martin Siegler (Bauhaus University Weimar): Assisted Attention. Exploring the Dead Man‘s Switch

Beate Ochsner & Markus Spöhrer (University of Konstanz): "When everybody plays, we all win". The Microsoft Adaptive Controller as a Socio-technical “Node” for “Normalization”

Keynote

Mara Mills (New York University): Switchboard Automation and the Disability History of 0s and 1s

Panel 2: Assisting environments
Chair: Anna–Lena Wiechern (Leuphana University Lüneburg)

Athanasios Karafillidis (Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen): Creating Environments for Support. Interfacing Exoskeletons with Physical Bodies in Technology Development

Felix Hüttemann & Monique Miggelbring (University of Paderborn): Living-environments as Assistive Environments?

Panel 3: Assisted standardization
Chair: Wolfgang Hagen (Leuphana University Lüneburg)

Dylan Mulvin (London School of Economics): Living Proxies: The Standardized Patient Program

Philipp Hauss (Burgtheater Wien): The Machine that Meditates for You

Panel 4: Assistance in visualization & planning
Chair: Jan Müggenburg (Leuphana University Lüneburg)

Paula Muhr (Humboldt University Berlin): Interactive Anatomical Brain Visualizations as Assistive Interfaces in fMRI

Yana Boeva / Ann-Kathrin Wortmeier (University of Stuttgart): Un/Intended Notions of Assistance in Architecture and Construction: Amplifying Power Disparities

Panel 5: Assisted conversation
Chair: Philipp Sander (Leuphana University Lüneburg)

Robert Stock (Humboldt University Berlin): Assisted Writing and Writing Assistants

Closing discussion

Notes:
1 Mara Mills / Jonathan Sterne: Afterword: Dismediation: Three Proposals, Six Tactics, in: Disability Media Studies, ed. by Elizabeth Ellcessor and Bill Kirkpatrick, New York 2017, p. 365–378, here: p. 366.
2 Colin Barnes: Understanding the social model of disability: past, present and future, in: Routledge Handbook of Disability Studies, ed. by N. Watson / A. Roulstone / C. Thomas, New York 2012, p. 12–29.