The Kindle™ as Necker Cube

Abstract

The early decades of the twenty-first century have witnessed various attempts by cultural critics to move beyond the Two Cultures divide posited by C.P. Snow in 1959, developing modes of critique that seek to bridge the gap between humans and the technology we use. This has resulted in relational interpretations of literature and technology that emphasise the interpenetrative nature of the reading experience, and the complex implications of conceiving of literature and technology as a system. Amazon's Kindle™ ebook reader provides an exceptional use case to ground this conversation, occupying a position somewhere between traditional reading device and techno-corporate publishing mechanism. Analyses of the Kindle™ often fail to take into account useful twentieth-century approaches to the philosophy of technology that offer purchase over the problem domain, however. Work by John Dewey (1859–1952) and Donald Ihde (1934–2024) suggest ways to conceive of the Kindle™ and similar devices as objects embedded in our experience of the world, mediated by technological systems and infrastructure but ultimately contributing to our experience of the world in much the same way as previous modes of publishing.