Roboticus or How Might I Live In a Tin Can

Apparently, according to Mark Poster, I am the technology that I use. The 'smart machine' I'm using to write this is not just a "neutral tool that only becomes objectionable by the uses to which it is put" or a technology that is judged primarily by its economic efficiencies and its end product (think large scale farming, smog, atomic bombs or agent orange). Simply put, the computer is not a technology that merely shapes and reshapes matter, it transcends the windmills and the hydroelectric plant of Heidegger's essay "Concerning Technology". Depending on your point of contact with smart machines this may be a bad thing (internet addiction, driving while on your cell phone) or a good thing (quick access to info, brain surgery, etc.). What smart machines do is reshape and reinvent our living spaces, figuratively and literally. Yep, I'm becoming my computer, my TV, my cell phone, my gaming machine, and my personal space is being invaded by all forms of wires and LED screens that dictate how and where I arrange the more mundane creature comforts of home and hearth, like desk, chair and sofa. I'm morphing at an ever increasing speed to become one with my electronic stuff: "Information machines transform the humans that use them". I would also contend that the lowly shovel, hammer, spear and wheel, transformed mankind as well, it just took a lot longer. This concept of speed and time and space is, I think, at the crux of the matter. If we look at older films, for example, we see that they had a different pace and spatiality to them. To the historic viewer they represented a reality that reflected their way of understanding narrative and emotion. Shots lingered longer, there were very few cut-aways and less frenetic cutting between shots. Gradually, with new technologies, movie and televisual presentations have become speeding bullets, zooming in and around the scenes, involving and engaging the viewer in ultra-reality and compressing time and space like never before. The narratives seem more involved with the superficial surface of things than the essence of narrative and character. And the interesting aspect of this is that we, the modern audience, can follow it and are able to understand and enjoy the product (well, some of the time). This fast paced style of communicating effects and is reflected in, every aspect of our daily lives. The speed of life has started to out-pace us and soon, possibly, as Poster suggests, we will ineluctably become "humachines". Should we be alarmed about the reconfiguration of time and space? Will it destroy our basic social institutions and the future of civilization? There is no question that it is already effecting our lives in innumerable ways, pro and con, but that doesn't mean that 'the end is nigh'. As Poster points out, it's not a case of Technophile against Technophobe. But he does caution against a neutral outlook that resigns to the fact that 'what we don't see or know won't hurt us'. Heidegger's claim that technology transforms our world and therefore ourselves but that our ability to see this transformation is not only hidden from us but "that our own being in the world is invisible to us" is a scary problematic. It's like being locked in a dark room and having to wrestle a one ton gorilla, oh, and you're blindfolded and in a straight-jacket - winner takes all. Poster wants to differentiate technologies, seperating the low brow (hydroelectric plants, windmills) and the high brow (computers, mass media), claiming that an essence, " a being of technology varies depending upon the material constraints of the technology." Poster believes that the specificity of the machine dictates its relationship to culture and to us. Therefore the being of my computer is found within itself: "The machine itself inscribes meaning...but it does so within its own register, not as a human subject would." Sooooo, my computer talks to itself and slavishly, but reluctantly does my bidding (wait, it doesn't rule me yet!). The technological essence is still hidden from us through Heidegger's enframing process. But, these new high brow machines are speaking a different, intrinsic language, a coded, covert language that is hitherto "unrepresentable" but is expressed, miraculously, through their interface with humans. Poster uses the example of the internet to explain that information technology is "opening new social and cultural worlds that are only beginning to be explored but that quite probably are already redefining what it means to be human". I love that quote - its filled with such blind optimism. You can't help but want to jump on board the cyberexpress and fullfill your human destiny, which according to Poster is to become the new human-machine; a technologically enhanced, biologically encumbered, irrational being, still trying to understand itself and uncover the hidden essence and communications of the technologies at its disposal through incomplete data seen through opaque eyes while time and space suck and blow simulatanously. I'm not sure I can handle the resounding echo of 'I told you so' in this damn tinny contraption!

Michael