Excerpt from evaluation:
“When Friedrich Kittler in his essay Protected Mode (1991) deciphered the Intel chip architecture as a system of bureaucratic governance, he also raised the question of the limited mode of operation of the programmer. In consequence the problem of the distinction between programmers (with growing limitations in the design of their code) and pure users of hard- and software (with even lesser degrees of freedom) becomes urgent. While different approaches try to examine the power of conducted scripture in continuation of Protected Mode, the question for the characteristics and the genealogy of the computer-user has widely been unconsidered. Philipp Dennert starts his final thesis Enabling the User. On the historical possibility conditions of the computer-user at this urgent desiderate. In order to wrest this unregarded figure from the matt reflection of the cathode ray tubes into the adequate light of an analysis of media studies, he applies an extensive historic tableau.

Starting from the question for these relations of power in human-computer-interaction Dennert develops a genealogy of the user, which avoids losing itself in the analysis of empirical facts or statistic user behaviour, but defines its complex and blurred subject by means of three aptly chosen ‘images’ or historical breaks. The main thesis of this undertaking follows the presumption that the user as ‘subject’ is significantly (or even exclusively) constructed by the media. From this initial point the goal is to excavate the historical conditions and the media-technical occurrences, which enable this kind of construction.(…).”

PDF in German