When you pointed out the situated and cultural diversity in how technologies are used, and consequently in how the agency of the technology – human – animal is performed, then the technologies – as fluid assemblages could be seen to respond to the situation. Not as a preexisting singular capital T Technology on a stage where there’s separated human | animal | technology, actors but as a ephemeral agency that emerges in the particular assemblage.

For example, the GPS in one kind of rescue situation is used to track rescue teams’ movements. It reacts to the movement of people carrying GPS devices and drawing the tracks in the system the rescue teams have designed. It doesn’t perceive any of the reasoning around the search and respond by being more or less accurate. However, when the rescuers then use the track not just as a means to ‘tick off’ quadrants they’ve searched, but to read the tracks as a documentation of the size and intensity of the search, to figure out where dogs are needed, how the dogs should be guided, then I think I can say the GPS as a human-animal-machine assemblage ‘responds’ to the situation differently, the tracks become something different in how the rescuers appropriate them. It becomes a different kind of GPS. Just like the the agency of human animal is shaped reflexively.

But human and animal can know themselves, reason and respond creatively and reflexively. Technology mhhhh. Maybe IT resonates in contact?