Graduation Year

2026

Document Type

Open Access Senior Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Science, Technology and Society

Second Department

Art

Reader 1

Professor Brian Keeley

Reader 2

Professor Aly Ogasian

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Terms of Use for work posted in Scholarship@Claremont.

Rights Information

2026 Sabrina M Feld

Abstract

This thesis argues that notifications are not merely features of digital devices but infrastructural forces that quietly reorganize the conditions under which communication is perceived, enacted, and understood. Drawing on Science, Technology, and Society (STS) frameworks, specifically Actor-Network Theory and Langdon Winner's concept of Forms of Life, the first chapter traces how notifications produce a Form of Life organized around continuous responsiveness, in which incoming information appears as a pending demand, silence carries new moral weight, and the capacity for self-determined availability is structurally foreclosed. Understood this way, notifications become a case study for a broader pattern in which technological systems gradually individualize attention, erode collective presence, and redefine care itself as a function of accessibility. The second chapter extends this inquiry through an artistic investigation developed across two connected projects, Fragments: September 28-November 9 (Fall 2025) and Please Respond (Spring 2026), using systematic making, duration, and material translation to extend the FOL investigation beyond STS theory in order to surface what this restructuring feels like from within. Together, these two modes of inquiry ask what kinds of communicative selves notifications enact, and what forms of connection and presence are placed at risk when the infrastructure of everyday life is organized around perpetual accessibility.

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