Posted: February 21st, 2013 | Author: Sophia | Filed under: Assignment 2 | No Comments »
I liked what Andy Clark wrote about how we are “natural-born cyborgs”. He argues that more than any other creature, the human brain is primed to adapt to technologies and extend its process into the world around us. He describes humans’ adaptation to technology throughout history as a “cascade of ‘mindware upgrades’: cognitive upheavals in which the effective architecture of the human mind is altered and transformed,” citing speech, written language, photography, etc. as major examples. The structure of the mind adapts to our surroundings, experiences, and the tools we use.
In the article describing Sparrow’s research, this is confirmed in the case where the presence of the internet affects the way people remember things. If the participants knew they would have internet access, they adopted a model of “transactive memory—recollections that are external to us but that we know when and how to access”.
I feel these effects myself. I grew up using computers as an early age, and I strongly sense that this has affected the way I organize my thoughts and how I process information.
Like Lanier, I also see an incredible danger in the malleability of the human mind being combined with a constant overlay whose its information is controlled by only one or two sources. This will drastically shape society and the way humans behave, and it will likely do so negatively if the new AR technologies are not designed thoughtfully and ethically. The potential pervasiveness of advertising in order to interact with these systems is quite disturbing also. (There is a great short story about this by the science fiction author J. G. Ballard called “The Subliminal Man” in which Ballard describes a future in which all of society’s behavior is controlled by billboards with subliminal advertising messages.) These AR devices could easily become the “gatekeeping functions” Lanier describes where advertisers pay for access to to our minds (only now in a much more direct way than ever before).
The design of an interface says much about how we see ourselves…it is how we believe we fit with the tools we use. Knowing how adaptable our mental processes are, what would it mean to design a system with a vision of how we wish we were instead of how we see ourselves now?
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