Assemblage is an assortment of things pieced together to create something else. The example that helped me best understand this was the exercise in class where we dissected the things needed to create a tweet. We pulled out any part we could think of like wifi, routers, characters, feedback systems, and many others. These all come together to form what is needed to make a tweet. We know these things are needed because if one part is lacking the experience we know as tweeting something out would not be the same. An error in assemblage can cause the domino effect to take place depending on what the error occurs in. The question in technology these days is whether to let technology fix these errors and give them the agency to do so or to have humans always checking through these aspects of technology so that the domino effect doesn’t occur. These errors are what occur when social media apps such as Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook go down and aren’t able to be used.
2 thoughts on “Assemblage- Thomas Takele”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
I like and agree with your interpretation of assemblage through the activity that we did in class. It is very true that assemblage is somewhat of a domino effect, and I think it’s interesting how this effects not only the topic in which the assemblage is focused on (in this case tweets), but other technological platforms are dependent on the same assemblage components. With then highlights the relationship between technology and its entire network that is formed around essential factors that make up media as a whole. The Facebook shut down is a good example of this. Various social media platforms (which all happen to be run by the same company) had a glitch in the system which resulted in a multiple hour shut down of multiple social media apps.
This example also helped me understand the idea of assemblages. I think often we think of media like tweets or Tiktok videos as individual entities and it is easy to forget all the elements that go into the creation of something like this. This made me wonder if there are any forms of media we interact with that aren’t assemblages. Like you mentioned, errors in assemblage can lead to functional difficulties in certain media. In this way of thinking, then infrastructure and networks would both be considered assemblages, which is an interesting idea to consider.