AO: Analysts note that an understanding of machines as collaborators in knowledge production, and an awareness of the impacts of materiality on such production, becomes a disciplinary as well as philosophical concern. Specifically, they note the effects, typically on reading, of the materiality of media (e.g. hyperlinks) (28). They highlight a need for appreciation of how agency might always flow back and forth, with humans impacting on technologies and the ways in which they might be deployed, and technologies impacting on their users such that the outcome of use is not determined by either side (32).
AO: Analysts highlight how tools are never neutral and so argue that they, like technicians and crowds, are more rightly thought of as collaborators, whether they are conceived of as such by their users or not.
