We are Informational Patterns....(Cheers)

For the record, the next number of blogs are going to be well out of order. I got behind and it gets harder and harder to play catch up (as obvious) especially if you try to keep things in order. So, I'm going out of order. Enjoy: Andy Clark, in Natural Born Cyborgs often surprised me. For the most part, I really enjoyed his writing. In a lot of way, it left me questioning some of my fundamental assumptions about what a cyborg really is. The most interesting part for me however, was to extend these ideas into what I think about videogames. You see, I tend to think about videogames through their interface. This includes looking at the controllers yes, but often goes quite a bit deeper than that. In videogames, the interface can account for everything from the controller, to the console, and into the software, where things like little red orbs can indicate health, and an idealized human figure can represent the player’s interaction with the game. In Clark’s ideas, he brings up the idea that “what is special about human brains, and what best explains the distinctive features of human intelligence, is precisely their ability to enter into deep and complex relationships with nonbiological constructs, props, and aids” (Clark 13). Human intelligence can be seen as an informational pattern, much the way that most programs in a computer are informational patterns. Mind you, the human intelligence is an extremely complicated informational pattern, but nonetheless, the fact that they are a pattern doesn’t change. Similarly, most software, hell, most objects, are also informational patterns. At foundational levels, they are patterns of molecules, shaped into things exist because of these very patterns. However, the patterns that we, as humans, use to define things go even further than that. The patterns of human society are usually written onto the objects around us, we literally write objects in order to influence or control their relationship to us. We apply this to rocks (which become stones for throwing, minerals for harvesting, etc.) and trees (look…wood!) and even other people (you are my friend, my lover, etc.). What is interesting about relationships is that, in each of them, we are never as fully in control as we think we are. While we believe that we are in control of the tool that we are using, the shovel, the computer, etc. is in service to us, when it can actually be looked at in a very different way. The tool can be an outside informational pattern that interfaces with us, using us to complete tasks that it could not complete on its own, and therefore extending its use. Most of the time these patterns are based on human designs, so when the computer is computing it uses humans to figure out what it is going to compute. Similarly, the shovel uses the human so that it can dig, and so it can figure out where to dig. Humans interactions with tools is in fact extending our patterns of action into them, and having their patterns of interaction extending into us. This is kinda an extension of a point I saw with Heidegger much earlier in the semester, but with less of a scary tone to it. We are part of a system, and in fact we are almost always extending our system to include the objects around us. We are informational patterns within larger informational patterns, interacting in ways that we can never really fully know. In this way, we are just like the tool, not so different in forms of being than they are, and therefore interesting in that way as well.

Framing

There is something that I’ve been thinking about for awhile, something that crystalized a bit as I read for my class in posthumanism, as well as in my class on videogames. Technology, as scholars like Peter-Paul Verbeek and many of the people he quotes point out that technology is a kind of mediation. It puts layers in between us and the world around us. Technology serves to reveal layers of reality, but in doing so it is specifically framing it in such ways that constantly change the relationship between subject and object, and even object and surroundings. The unmediated experience, in this way of thinking, perhaps doesn’t exist, with even the tools of our hands changing our experience, moving us to different frames of understanding of the world around us (frames that we happily can move up and down through with quite a bit of ease). I ought to clarify a bit though…I am pulling this idea of framed ideas out of a reading for my videogame class, an essay by Mia Consalvo titled, “There is no Magic Circle.” It is an essay that refers to Erving Goffman’s book Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience and G.A. Fine’s book Shared Fantasy: Role Playing Games as Social Worlds and notes the fact that unlike what the early scholar of play, Huizinga, thought, that play didn’t necessarily create a magic circle that separated it from the world around it, but rather, as indicated by Goffman and Fine, that rather there is a frame system going on, one which Fine points out with games, allows us to move quickly from one layer of framing to another through a process of keying, that is, a set of introductions that can move us in and out of the a game world based on pieces of input (keys) that transform us to another frame of mind. This might be a puppy intruding with a happy face lick (yes, it’s happening right as I write this) or an insistent roommate, spouse, or phone that intrudes on the experience currently being played out.

While very relevant to understanding the social relationships of game players to the world around them, it seems to me that this idea of framing isn’t so far off to the way we are thinking about technologies mediation of experience…and even more interestingly, the way it mediates us. Technology, it seems to me, continually provides a context that we are working within at any particular point. It is part of a series of frames that we are interacting with at any one point, separating and filtering the world around us, deciding not only our relationship with whatever the mediated object is (whether that is game), but also very much deciding how we are perceivable as well. I know when I’m playing a game, and when I am writing a paper, where my face probably looks a bit zombieish, to say the least. The game in a certain way is setting up a frame for how I am perceived in the world around me…probably in part a reason I have trouble playing solo games when there is company about…even if I’m not particularly intent on interacting with that company.

But this goes for many other forms of technology as well. Verbeek speaks about how glasses, a low contrast technology, changes both the perception of the world in front of him, but also people’s perception of him, the subject as well. Being with or without the technology device creates different kinds of frames that he can interact with, especially true as the visual of the frames themselves insert themselves on his world. But there are keys into the movement to the inside and outside of these technological realms. Sometimes it is keyed up by our ability, or more appropriately, our inability to see, or read something (put the glasses back on), sometimes it’s the desire to see beyond our normal range of expectation…or to get a much closer frame of understanding (as in Verbeek’s example of the microscope). These create frames of understanding that we have to key in and out of in order to put them into relationship with the world we know as “reality” (I use the term loosely :) ). The microscope fundamentally changes our experience to such a degree that there needs to be bridges formed, keys in place, for us to even understand how the micro in some way effects the macro (science at its finest :) ), without which the technology becomes a frame through which we have a hard time forming a real relationship with. The frame is very permeable at any one point, and this is important, because we are constantly having to readjust to adjust to every movement of framing that we do in order to experience the world around us, letting both inner and outside influences change our direction, thereby letting me move from zombie gameplayer, or better yet typist, into casual participant in the house in the blink of an eye…as I’m going to do right now.

There is something about the readings that was interesting, but also slightly bothered me. Heidegger discusses the idea that “everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it” (1). In a very significant way, most of the readings today were about that chain…about the way in which we cannot really break away from the power and influence that technology has on us. This came in the form of actual, physical representations of chains, as in the story of “Harrison Bergeron,” where all people are chained by technology to be equal, but only by bringing the superior down, not by bringing the lowly up, but it also comes in the method of showing how we really are chained to the technologies around us. “I, Pencil,” while discussing the idea that nobody knows how to make…well…you know…almost anything, manages to demonstrate the ways in which technologies govern us. This goes beyond the physical representations of tools, but to the broader concepts of civilization. Civilization, under this conception, is a technology for organizing us in such a way that nobody really has control over their own lives, the ability to truly walk away from the system.

In other words…we are the technology.

We are the gears and the cogs that put us into service to a much larger system, one that can never, or at least almost never, care about any particular individual. It’s kinda scary really…and it really gives an interesting perspective to start a class about posthumanism on. Yes, technology does shape our lives. We are all changed by even the technologies today that seem relatively simple (at least in comparison)…”The Telephone” being an excellent example. But we have never really even lived outside this conception of technology. The group mentality, working together, is a systematic technology that subsumes the individual, and (though obviously I am no real expert on the distant past) I’m sure it’s one that we’ve put to use in hunting, gathering, and living, for almost as long as we have been human, and quite likely even before, when we were…um, prehuman? So which technological advance makes us posthuman then? When did it happen? How did we get to a point where suddenly we considered technology to have changed us to being beyond human? Is it the first time that the cogs couldn’t understand the larger system with relative ease…and therefore be in some kind of control of it? That seems possible, even likely to me, but again, it means we’ve been posthuman for a very, very long time then. Because the machines that govern us (and lets fully admit it, our iphones, laptops, and tablets very much govern us today) are only the latest incarnations of how technology has chosen roles for individuals, rather than individuals choosing roles for themselves. It seems we are likely to be a self-perpetuating system, where individuals seem to believe they have freedom, but where none of us really knows how to create much.

And to leap into my own field of study…this is perhaps a reason children are some of the most free of us (though probably less so as technology enters their lives earlier and earlier), because while controlled by a number of outside factors, they are still the most likely to attempt to create something with the basic building blocks around us. A stick, some mud…these are still interesting to them, and therefore still freeing. “I, Pencil” talks about wonder…and the way in which it is lost to us. I think this is part of being a cog…of not understanding what you create. The less we’re interested in how the technology works, how it is made, how to make it…the less we can even be involved in the wonder of these amazing technologies around us.

Scary much?