Science and Technology

Prosthetic Gods

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 26 Comments

A cadre of people decked out in half space suits, half combat armor walk through a desolate, arid wilderness toward a bunker.  A door opens revealing a passageway into an abandoned underground installation.  On a platform elevator they descend hundreds of feet.  As they continue through hexagonal corridors they notice a helmet, not unlike theirs, lying ominously on the ground.  Finally, they enter a room where a solitary metallic object suspended in mid-air spins on its axis.  One man removes his armor from his right arm and extends his now bare arm into an opening in the object.  The object stops spinning.  His comrades look on with apprehension; the man pulls out his arm.  As he does so his arm morphs into a mechanical, cyborg arm.  Then, and this is the climax, from the palm of his newly mechanized arm, the Droid X emerges.

Now there’s a commercial, and if you haven’t already seen it, you can watch for yourself at the end of this post.  I first saw this commercial sitting in the theater waiting for Inception to begin, only I didn’t immediately realize it was a commercial.  Had I walked in just then I would have assumed the previews had started.  A bit over-the-top perhaps, but maybe not.

There’s a lot that can be said about this elaborate piece of sci-fi marketing, but let’s take it at face value.  It is actually a rather straightforward dramatization of an important and intriguing metaphor:  technology as prosthesis.  Marshall McLuhan, patron saint of media studies, popularized the concept that our tools or technologies function as prosthetic extensions of our bodies.  For example, the hammer functions as an extension of the hand, the wheel as an extension of the foot, or electric technology functions as an extension of the nervous system.  McLuhan, however, was neither the first nor the last to employ the metaphor.  In Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud suggested that,  “Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic god.”   But man also wore his prosthetic divinity awkwardly.  Freud goes on to say, “When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on to him and they still give him much trouble at times.”

Technology as a prosthetic enhancement has been a rich concept deployed by a variety of philosophers and critics including Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, and Donna Haraway.  In her “Cyborg Manifesto,” Haraway in particular argued that our technologies have been making the line between natural and artificial, machine and organism, cyborg and human more than a little fuzzy.  Often the idea of technology as prosthetic is paired with the related metaphor of amputation — something gained, something lost — so that on the whole there is a certain ambiguity about our prosthetic tools.  You can read more about the concept in a well-written overview here, but I want to focus on the very simple idea that our technologies became a part of us.

Think about this in light of the question that I asked in yesterday’s post, “A God that Limps.” Why do we react so defensively when we hear someone criticize our technologies?  The concept of prosthesis suggests a compelling response:  because we take it not as a criticism of some object apart from us, but rather as an object that has become in some sense a part of us.  We hear such criticism as a criticism of ourselves.

The more seamlessly a technologies blends in with our bodies, the more attached we become.  Take the Blue Tooth enhanced cell phone, for example, responsible for all those people seemingly talking to themselves.  Notice how this metaphor helps explain that odd development.  The device has become transparent, we forget it is even there.  This makes the communication seem almost unmediated consequently causing us to act as naturally as if we were in the person’s presence (and only that person’s presence).  Or take the iTouch/iPhone/iPad that allows us to magically touch the Internet; now that is an extension of the central nervous system!  Gone is the clunky mouse or keyboard, we now appear to be touching the information itself, the layers of mediation seem to be peeling away.

The better these tools work, the more invisible they become; or, as the Droid X commercial suggests, the more they become a part of us.  Tweaking Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law just a little, we might say that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from our bodies.  Naturally, we are pretty defensive of our bodies; not surprisingly we tend to be pretty defensive of our technologies as well.

Parodying our Self-referential Obsessions

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 1 Comment

Folks at The Onion are masters of parody.  In this very funny clip they target World of Warcraft players, but they do so in a way that gets painfully close to all of us for whom the pleasures of Web 2.0 are tinged with a dash of narcissism.  It may be that charm of social media lies in watching other people watch us so that ultimately we are captivated by our own reflection.

h/t:  Mr. Gladding

A God that Limps

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 1 Comment

Our technologies are not unlike our children; we react with reflexive and sometimes intense defensiveness if either is criticized.  Several years ago while teaching at a small private high school I forwarded an article to my colleagues.  This was a mistake.  The article raised some questions about the efficacy of computers in education.  I didn’t think then, nor do I now, that it was at all controversial.  In fact, I imagined that given the setting it would be of at least passing interest.  The article appeared in a respectable journal, was judicious in its tone, and cautious in its conclusions.  However, within a handful of minutes — hardly enough time to skim, much less read, the article — I was receiving rather pointed and even angry replies.

I was mystified, and not a little amused, by the responses.  Mostly though I began to think about why this measured and cautious article evoked such a passionate and visceral response.  Around the same time I stumbled upon Wendell Berry’s essay titled, somewhat provocatively, “Why I am Not Going to Buy a Computer.” More arresting than the essay itself, however, were the letters that came in to Harper’s where the essay had been reprinted.  These letters, which now typically appear alongside the essay whenever it is anthologized, were caustic and condescending.  In response Berry wrote,

The foregoing letters surprised me with the intensity of the feelings they expressed. According to the writers’ testimony, there is nothing wrong with their computers; they are utterly satisfied with them and all that they stand for. My correspondents are certain that I am wrong and that I am, moreover, on the losing side, a side already relegated to the dustbin of history. And yet they grow huffy and condescending over my tiny dissent. What are they so anxious about?

Precisely my question.  Whence the hostility, defensiveness, agitation, and indignant, self-righteous anxiety?

I’m typing these words on a laptop and they will appear on a blog that exists on the Internet.  Clearly I am not, strictly speaking, a Luddite.  (Although, in light of Thomas Pynchon’s analysis of the Luddite as Badass, there may be a certain appeal.)  Yet, I do believe an uncritical embrace of technology may prove fateful, if not Faustian.

The stakes are high.  We can hardly exaggerate the revolutionary character of certain technologies throughout history:  the wheel, writing, the gun, the printing press, the steam engine, the automobile, the radio, the television, the Internet.  And that is a very partial list.  Katherine Hayles has gone so far as to suggest that as a species we have “codeveloped with technologies; indeed, it is no exaggeration,” she writes in Electronic Literature, “to say modern humans literally would not have come into existence without technology.”

We are, perhaps because of the pace of technological innovation, quite conscious of the place and power of technology in our society and in our own lives.  We joke about our technological addictions, but it is sometimes a rather nervous punchline.  It makes sense to ask questions.  Technology, it has been said, is a god that limps.  It dazzles and performs wonders, but it can frustrate and wreak havoc.  Good sense seems to suggest that we avoid, as Thoreau put it, becoming tools of our tools.  This doesn’t entail burning the machine; it may only require a little moderation.  At a minimum it means creating, as far as we are able, a critical distance from our toys and tools, and that requires searching criticism.

And we are back where we began.  It is that kind of searching criticism of our technologies that we seem allergic to.  So here is my question again:  Why do we react so defensively when we hear someone criticize our technologies?  Or, and this is entirely possible, is this not at all the case outside of my own quite limited experience?

Apple School of Witchcraft and Wizardry

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 1 Comment

Here is one more reason to bookmark Big Questions Online (despite the somewhat silly name), Alan Jacobs will be contributing a monthly column.  His first piece, “Steve Jobs:  Shaman and Sorcerer,” posted yesterday includes this observation:

To turn back the cultural clock, as it were, to take a set of technologies that Apple had already deployed in the iPhone and improve them, repackage and repurpose them in a way that functions with near-absolute smoothness: this is the goal of the iPad. It’s a device meant to mediate the web flawlessly, and to do so — and this is perhaps the most important thing — not primarily by altering what you see or hear but rather by giving you manual control. On the iPad you make things happen by moving your hands around, like a wizard, except you don’t need either a mouse or a wand. You don’t even need those funky gloves that Tom Cruise wore in Minority Report. You touch the Internet: you stroke it, swipe it, pinch it. And it responds precisely to your will. And only Apple can give you that.

I’m not exactly vested in the whole PC/Apple thing, but I thought this was an insightful and elegant observation by Jacobs.  Read the whole piece to get the full context for the analogy.

Given my current interest in embodiment, I found Jacobs’ emphasis on “manual control” and “touch” particularly intriguing.  Forgive the pun, but I think he has put his finger on an important source of the iPad’s appeal.  The iPad exercises its uncanny appeal despite the fact that many believe it is not much more than a glorified iTouch with little that is new or otherwise groundbreaking.  I suspect the uncanny appeal lies precisely in the way it engages the sense of touch to give the user seemingly immediate (without the mediation of keyboard, mouse, etc.) interaction with the Internet.  Or to look at it another way, it moves us closer to experiencing the Internet as a kind prosthesis which blurs the boundary between body and  information.

More from Marilynne Robinson

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 1 Comment

Take a moment to read Marilynne Robinson’s reflections on “Religion, Science, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality” at The Huffington Post.  Here’s a helpful distinction she makes:

The debate is said to be between science and religion. It would be more accurate to call the contending sides atheism and faith, since neither science nor religion in any classic sense is represented in the present struggle.

And another point well made:

I don’t claim to know what it means to say that we are made in the image of God, but I profoundly and instinctively believe it and all that it implies. Therefore it appalls me that some people who call themselves Christian are willing to hate and insult and deprive other human beings, and even carry guns so they will be ready to kill one or two of them on short notice. And it appalls me that people who claim for their views the authority of science routinely and arbitrarily insist on a brutally reductionist notion of what a human being is, what the human mind is, that justifies as inevitable every sort of meagerness and rapacity. As is so often the case when controversy turns bilious, the two sides have entirely too much in common.