Dourish is even more intrigued by what the mediation of communication through technology does to our embodied interactions with one another:

 

[T]echnology is increasingly the medium within which activity takes place. We are used to the ways in which the physical world mediates our actions, and how it forms a shared environment whose characteristics are thoroughly predictable; when we converse face to face, I understand how my gestures will appear to you (and in fact, if I didn’t, there would be little point in making them). Technological systems as a medium for social conduct are very different inasmuch as the inherently disconnected, representational nature of computer systems means that actions can be transformed in unpredictable ways. (97)

 

We have probably all had the experience of miscommunicating by text, having our snarky or sarcastic comment misunderstood in all seriousness, or the stilted and fragmentary images of our bodies and faces through Skype or (worse) Google Hangout freeze us in grimaces and awkward positions.

 

But we also want to think Dourish through Ahmed—that is, think “technological systems as a medium for social conduct” not just person to person through object, but person to object to same person. That is, how do our objects orient us, sometimes in ways we want, sometimes in ways we don’t? What conditions that orientation? As Dourish himself maintains, “technological systems are themselves embedded in a set of social and cultural practices that give them meaning at the same time as being constrained and transformed by them” (97). Those systems and their relationships to, with, and through us are dynamic. Jonathan walks along, speaking notes into his phone, actually shaking it when queer becomes clear, speaking aloud as though he could chastise the phone for correcting him. Jackie talks to her new car, issuing voice commands for music and phone, and punches buttons and swears at the woman’s voice issuing through the speakers when it misunderstands her. We have embodied interactions with a medium we use to communicate with ourselves. Dourish wants to see such couplings—his word—as phenomenologically rich, as embodied and orienting:

 

The primary characteristic of technologies supporting embodied interaction is that they variously make manifest how they are coupled to the world, and so afford us that opportunity to orient to them in a variety of ways. We see, again and again, the ways in which embodied interactive technologies allow us to easily engage with them on multiple levels. (154, emphasis added)

 

Yes, sometimes. However, we’re more queerly drawn to those moments when engagement is not so easy, when we are shaking phones or punching buttons on the steering wheel instead of caressing our technologies. Dourish imagines technologies “afford[ing] us that opportunity to orient to them,” a trajectory that certainly understands the object as acting on us. But we also at times resist that object and its agency.