The call for greater data literacy intersects powerfully with identity construction, with the forming and orienting of particular kinds of selves and subjects. Before we go too much further down the path, we insist on an intervention, a space and time for reflection. We insist on a queering of our technologies, and of ourselves through them. To do so requires that we hit pause, that we reconceive and reimagine our spatial and temporal relationships to our technologies.

 

In Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means, Siegfried Zielinski argues for an expansive view of the history of media technologies that would problematize a progressivist understanding of media as moving from simple to complex technologies. Instead, Zielinski urges us to consider the many trade-offs made in the long history of media—gaining some capabilities to mediate our world more richly to one another and to ourselves while losing others. We might think, for instance, of the mixed blessing called Facebook—a site for mapping networks and staying connected but also for facebragging and plentiful opportunities to feel that you aren’t quite keeping up sufficiently with the digital Joneses. However, Zielinski maintains:

 

When the spaces for action become ever smaller for all that is unwieldy or does not entirely fit in, that is unfamiliar and foreign, then we must attempt to confront the possible with its own impossibilities, thus rendering it more inspiring and worth experiencing. We must also seek a reversal with respect to time, which—in an era characterized by high-speed technologies and their permeation of teaching, research, and design —has arguably become the most prized commodity of all. (11)

 

We have conceived Techne to work both spatially and temporally to enact a confrontation and a reversal—a confrontation with digital spaces (such as Facebook, but other digital technologies as well) that seek to lay down tracks for us to travel on, to narrate our stories in particular and predetermined ways; and a reversal of those tracks, especially those laid down by high-speed orientations toward time that preempt a productive looking-back, a meditation on memory and imagination. We intend Techne to be a different kind of facebook, one permeated by memory, theory, fantasy, argument, narration, and futurity—all rendered through media designed to interrupt and disorient the flows that would keep us from experiencing, relishing, and learning from the messiness of lives lived queerly.