Virtual Pigment: Blog

Lewis Mumford, in his 1966 book The Myth of the Machine: Technics and Human Development–

Secret knowledge is the key to any system of total control. Until printing was invented, the written word remained largely a class monopoly. Today the language of higher mathematics plus computerism has restored both the secrecy and the monopoly, with a consequent resumption of totalitarian control.

I’m noting this in hopes of remembering it later. Because, what Ms. Turkle is addressing is, it seems to me, exactly what Merleau-Ponty is talking about in “Phenomenology of Perception,” that as humans we can only experience things mediated through our entire corpus. So: in experiencing the virtual, what do we miss and/or ignore, phenomenologically speaking?
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Q: (Frontline) “If Philip Rosedale, the creator of Second Life, was sitting here, he’d say you’re just privileging the real over the virtual. Why can’t one enhance one’s range in a virtual world?”

One can. But ultimately we are creatures with bodies, and the pleasures of our bodies are major. And to just say, “Well, let’s raise a generation that can do it all in their heads,” I say, “Why would you want to deny the pleasures of the body?,” because we are creatures of our bodies, of our faces. We are evolutionarily designed to communicate at the highest level with the tiniest twitch of our voices, our faces. These are, in some ways, the highest expression of who we are as people.

Read more: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/digitalnation/interviews/turkle.html#ixzz1U9xneK00

This week I finished Sherry Turkle’s latest book Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (2010, MIT Press). From Ms. Turkle’s bio:

“Turkle is Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT and the founder (2001) and current director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self.”

In the first part of Alone Together, she looks at [mostly Western] human reaction to the current generation of robots, both experimental and commercial. A compelling and nearly universal reaction to creature-like robots is for people to invest them with emotion, even though emotion cannot be a part of their programming. Yet simulated emotion by way of rote ‘reaction,’ often is. As I was reading this, I could not help but think of how “the gaze” takes on new and potentially disturbing implications with the advent of robotic ‘creatures,’ for it is largely because of facial/eye-tracking capabilities of the robots that we are compelled to think of them as more than they are. In Turkle’s words, to “meet them more than halfway.”

The second half of the book is devoted to contemporary communications technologies, texting and Facebook (and other social media) in particular. Turkle provides many examples of a curious generation gap between tweens and teens, and their parents; the younger generation experiencing and articulating a loss of (human) contact with their cell-phone/Blackberry addicted parents, even as they themselves are the “texting generation.” Alone Together is far from a polemic however; it is thoughtful look at both the empowering and dissassociating implications of new technologies.