I am writing this response to a conference paper that argues that the internet can alieviate alienation. I couldn’t be more sympathetic, but her paper doesn’t really address the concerns of the opposing camp, which says that the internet could never substitute for real relationships. Dreyfus has his catchphrase: “Whatever hugs do for people, telehugs wont do it”. The opposing view is something like “You’re never alone when you have the internet”.
But the more I think about it, the more obvious it is that this is a false dichotomy. There was a post on Boing Boing a while ago about Lover’s Cups.
The Lover’s Cups can enhance the traditional communications. Julie and her best friend Ann live in different states. When Julie got tired or stressed, she had a conversation with Ann through the internet messenger program. However, the text-only communication limited their sympathy and emotional interactions. Today, Julie and Ann use their Lover’s Cups. Julie suggests to Ann to have a coffee break by shaking her cup. While talking through the messenger, they have a feeling of that they are drinking coffee together, and it makes them feel more relaxed and connected.
It strikes me that this feeling of ‘connection’ through the cups will only cause the appropriate affective state in a person in very special circumstances, and only with a very willing participant- putting the status of successful affective interaction on par with, say, hypnotism or tarot card reading. Someone who doesn’t buy into the conceit of these cups just won’t get anything out of it.
But this analysis goes a long way to explaining the hard-nosed stance of the two opposing camps. Dreyfus and the skeptics see this as at most a degenerate form of interaction, at worst that the players are just fooling themselves and are too eager to buy into the technological hype. But the other side, the true believers, just don’t see the problem with these interactions, especially if and when people do find something meaningful about engaging in them. Every online confessional about how much this new technology helps people who really need it reinforces their view, and they just can’t see how Dreyfus’ intellectualist arguments do any work of deflating the genuine fulfillment people can get out of their technology. The problem is of course exacerbated by the fact that children are being raised in an environment where these kinds of interactions are the norm, and technology permeates nearly every aspect of their lives and personal interactions (see the booming popularity of myspace among the 12-16 year olds, for instance). Dreyfus realizes of course that no argument he could give would dissuade people from engaging in their technological fantasies, and he is left lamenting the modern age along with every reactionary before him.
But we don’t want to be reactionary. We want a theoretical understanding of technology and technologically mediated interactions that account for Dreyfus’ worries, and yet are sensitive to the fact that some people can and do use these technologies with great success and satisfaction.
These are new ways of communicating and in these new ways people have developed short hand, slang, etc. much like CB radios Good buddy. I’m not sure what there is to be reactionary about? Unless it is a situation where there is a all or nothing stance and where you have two camps that can’t seem to see value in a world with both technological and face to face forms of communication. I guess for me the new high tech forms of communication are only problematic if they lead to a culture that loses the ability to communicate in a tactful and civil way in the physical face to face world where I think there is still much more accountability. But I don’t know if there have been studies to see if those that are using high tech forms of communication are less good at the face to face or not? Certainly the shut in, that for whatever reason or excuse adheres to sociopathic behavior might find life a bit easier with the high tech but I certainly hope that does not encourge more people to adopt such behavior.
Since people give meaning to technologies, technologies mean as much as we make of them. If we use the internet for meaningful communication, I don’t think Dreyfus’ worries make sense. Sure, in the early stages of a technology, we might still be working out the details, but, over time, we sometimes come to employ a technology for purposes that weren’t originally intended.
In the case of the internet & lovers cups, perhaps those researchers are making the technology hold more meaning/possibility for meaning than it had before.
And, if we think of language itself as a technology, Dreyfus’ worries don’t seem to make sense at all. Some technologies can aid our ability to communicate and to have real relationships, like language.
So, I guess the question is: what does Dreyfus take to be technology? What is his definition? This is the starting point if we are to understand technology.
Joseph Pitt describes technology as “humanity at work” and suggests that such things as court systems are technologies. In a more recent paper, yet unpublished, he argues that humans are technological artifacts because we(humans) have been bred to be the way we are over time and our education is an attempt to get a desirable final product, however parents/educators define that. So, it follows that humans are ‘designed objects’ in some way. What would Dreyfus make of this? What do you make of this?
ah yes, the internet, taking D&Ders back out of their basements and back to their bedrooms, where they belong, all alone, only this time, instead of their imaginary friends thinking they’re cool, their “real live” internet friends think they’re cool.
so yeah, success and satisfaction for those who can’t handle face to face interactions, give it credit for whatever it’s worth.
you said people can get to know each other on the web to me the other day, and it got me thinking about all the times one internet person said that something didn’t sound like something another internet person would say or do. because you all know each other so darn well. :rolleyes:
I think language isn’t a technology understood broadly. Language is just communication. Lots of animals, including insects, communicate in some sense, and have more or less sophisticated signals for a variety of things in their environment and for their interpersonal relations. I don’t think that’s technology on any sensible definition of technology, unless you want to claim that life itself is cybernetic. In which case both terms lose their meaning.
Language becomes a technology with the advent of the written word, which is an external storage medium for communication. That changes the game entirely. With written language, what you say lasts, and can influence people at different times and places from the original communicator. There is precedence for this, for instance with cultural myths, but written language takes that to a whole new level. Witten language also imposes structure and standardization on language, which tends to give the illusion of uniformity and meaning to the way we speak, which in turn encourages further specialization and sophistication.
Language, at least as treated by contemporary philosophers of mind, is the Ur-technology, from which all other technologies come, including math and science. Its what makes us civilized, as opposed to just another animal roaming the earth.
The internet is in some sense a fundamental change on par with written language. Though it depends on written language (and a host of other technologies), it has the same dramatic effect of drastically decreasing the constraints of space and time and radically increasing interactivity and cross-pollenation of ideas. But, like language, this doesn’t suddenly make us radically free, in the way I think you suggest in your paper. The internet comes with a host of new constraints, standardizations, and norms that we must learn and obey.
In short, the internet is a new environment for us to explore. And we explore it together.
There is a tendancy to see technology as extensions or aspects of the human organism itself, to treat us as cyborgs in Andy Clark’s sense. Andy thinks that the use of language itself is a kind of cybernetic enhancement, like getting a hearing aid or using a cell phone, but on a much greater level. The problem is that it is individualistic and unltimately unfair to the legitimate contributions of the machines themselves. It leaves an irreducible homunculus in all activities; all actions become actions of an agent, even broadly construed. The cyborg implies that there is ultimately an agent in control of the collective.
The problem with this is that our technology acts on us, our knowledge, and our environment in ways that neither I nor its ‘designers’ might have expected or anticipated, and with consequences that no one can forsee. Nothing- no thing- drives technological change. And its effects, as I have tried to argue repeatedly (see the archives), are properly attributed to the machines themselves, and not to any person or group in particular. The internet isn’t just an extension of our humanity. It is a technological beast in its own right, that is gone over by many hands, and with no coherent plans. More importantly, the machines that constitute the internet are themselves responsible for much of the content and organization of that information- see your favorite search engine or wiki. Ultimately, the machines we surround ourselves with aren’t just passive tools or infrastructure for our own, uniquely human, projects. Our machines are participants in our social games, and they deserve to be recognized as such.
Its a radical thesis, I know, and this response is already too long for me to defend it here. Again, look at the archives, I’ve tried to argue for this point many times. I think the first step towards this view, however, is to reject the very notion from ‘design’ as a natural kind, or as helpful in explaining any aspect of our technological interactions. The distinction of the ‘designed’ is artificial and illusory, and the product of an anthropocentric bias that must be dismantled. Humanity learns and grows and evoles together, and likewise our technology learns and grows and evolves with us.
So people don’t make technology? Seems like they certainly started it with the cuneiform made by people. I don’t know what you have to back up your claim that the unifromity that languages yields is an illusion or that the design of technologies is also an illusion. Seems that there are people out there figuring how to bring new technologies into the world and looking forward to emerging markets. I still have Windows ’98 on my laptop and as far as I know it hasn’t evolved into XP, though I wish it would.
erpisa wrote: “The internet isn’t just an extension of our humanity. It is a technological beast in its own right, that is gone over by many hands, and with no coherent plans. More importantly, the machines that constitute the internet are themselves responsible for much of the content and organization of that information- see your favorite search engine or wiki. Ultimately, the machines we surround ourselves with aren’t just passive tools or infrastructure for our own, uniquely human, projects. Our machines are participants in our social games, and they deserve to be recognized as such.”
I think this idea of technologies having agency themselves is a bit far-fetched. They can only have as much agency as we give them, as we understand them to have. Technologies are not created or adopted by themselves — people are involved in their creation and adoption and evolved uses. There are many examples of technologies that have failed to catch on for whatever reason, like the Videophone that we discussed in an email.
While some of our technologies are becoming more advanced and more complex, fewer people understand why things work out the way they do. I would have no clue on how to repair my laptop, but I can easily replace broken parts in the tank of my toilet. With greater complexity comes a greater lack of understanding — few people understand the WHOLE system, which is why science has become so fragmented into specialities. It may seem that technology has a life of its own, but, if it does, it is our own doing. Greater complexity and lack of understanding creates greater chances for us not to understand the repercussions of our systems. We release toxins because we don’t know they are harmful, and we put small sized particles in sunscreens when we don’t know how they will be absorbed by the skin. But, still, we are making the choices. We are choosing to trust the technology (the people who created and implemented and built the technology), and I don’t lament this, but I cannot see how technology creates/evolves itself.
What we do, how we use them, the choices we make: that’s how technologies evolve.
See, I think this is a confusion on both fronts. I dont understand how someone can both be open to suggesting that humans are technological artifacts or ‘designed’, and yet reject the idea that actual designed artifacts are incapable of agency. Its a double standard.
Toliverchap: Of course I am using the idea of evolution loosely, but it is definitely a kind of development or growth, and evolution is just development on the genetic time scale. Windows is the kind of thing that develops by releasing new versions that you have to install, sure. But like Ashew says, whether or not these things take or fail to find purchace is not up to the designer, nor is it up to the individual consumers. Technology is memetic in this sense. It catches on or it doesnt.
The other obvious point to make is that people don’t derive new technologies from nowhere. There is no such thing as design. Most technologies are scraped together from lots of existing technologies, by putting them together in a new way or using something for a novel purpose. But thats a well known evolutionary trick- its called exaptation. I’m not denying that bright and clever people can sit down and figure something out, but calling it ‘designed’ makes it sound like these things are pulled from the ether and imbued with meaning.
Who gives Google meaning or agency? Remember, Google calculates its search results by crawling the web looking for the links between pages, and tallys it all up to discover the semantic relevance of whatever term you care to search. So the code built by the designers is just a crawler and calculator, and a huge database management system. But without the web- that is, without everyone on the internet linking and connecting to each other- then that code is powerless. Google is a system that basically listens in on our conversations and monitors our behavior, and then acts accordingly to restructure the information it has (and that we rely on) to better suit our needs. And here’s the kicker: they way we subsequently behave and converse on the net is extremely sensitive to Google’s tinkering. These are symbiotic feedback loops, not between us and the CEO of the corporation GOOG, or between us and a bunch of engineers, but between us and an artificial system.
Now both of you want to say that whatever Google is doing, its properly attributed to its designers. But the designers aren’t making relevance decisions. They aren’t selecting which search result comes first. No human has a hand in that. All they did was build a system, and that system happens to work well, and because it works it gets used, which makes it even more efficient and powerful.
Of course, nothing evolves by itself. It evolves to suit an environment. And as it happens, constitute the environment of many of the artificial systems we are discussing. And, of course, they constitute our environment as well.
I think this confusion can be greatly reduced if you just tell me are you using Matrix rules or Terminator rules.
you mention the youth a lot and i wonder how much research has been/can even be done on youth + tech (surely more in europe)… the lovers cup does not even make sense for youth… on chat programs you simply ring each other’s door bells, make faces… i wonder why you do not consider emoticons if you consider these lover cups as something significant? perhaps emoticons have been talked-up/out but regardless of the q of ‘real life’ peeps are so connected so easily through technology, particularly the young and the alienated…
i wonder what alienation has to do with bodies? does it not have more to do with interaction and ideas which are not necessarily bodily, even if we are only facing this today? i am less alienated online than at work, for instance… clearly peeps whose bodies “get in the way” are less “alienated” online… right?