There are those that say that without intention there is no movement. So, I’d like to briefly outline my intent for this blog, where I’m coming from, and where I’m aiming to go…
After quite a bit of deliberation, I’ve decided to focus on my public and academic activities – writings, lectures, conferences, and relevant musings. Living and working in Israel, I’d like to open my academic interests and work to communication with other media researchers out there – so hopefully this will be a good platform to do so.
This does mean that some of the links and content will necessarily be in Hebrew (such as presentations and speech notes given here in Israel) – but hopefully with labeling and translations where possible, it won’t be too confusing.
To get started, I want to articulate my position towards digital technology in general, and give a brief overview of where I’m thinking of going with this in my studies. This is still a relatively informal and personal take on the subject, so this isn’t supposed to present any “new” or formalized concepts or ideas – but rather to simply clarify the impetus behind what I’ll be working on in the next few years.
So, my ““technological ideology”” focuses on 3 main aspects:
First of all, I fully believe that technology is at essence part of our humanity. Carl Sagan presented a fascinating discussion in his book “Dragons of Eden” suggesting that the expulsion from the Garden of Eden is a mythical portrayal of the evolution of human intelligence. Our human intelligence is first and foremost a symbolizing intelligence – but this capacity is both fueled and directed at our activity in the world around us. Tools, and their modern counterpart, technology, are concrete realizations of our symbolic comprehension of the world around us. They bridge between our existing reality and what we want to enable – our envisioned reality.
Secondly, I believe that technology is at essence part of our divinity and evolutionary drive (or ‘creativity’ ‘actualized self’, ‘transcendent unconscious’, essential core – or whatever terminology you’re more comfortable with). I discovered Teilhard de Chardin a number of years ago. His depth of perception into the inner workings of our natural world, and their integral connection with spiritual dimensions are a constant inspiration, and I’m deeply evolutionary in my approach to technology.
And finally, I view digital technology, specifically, to be inherently about connection, communication and synthesis.
Putting all of this together, I view digital technology to be a fundamental turning point in our humanity. On one hand, we are at a lowpoint. Words such as meaning, value, understanding, compassion and vision have been inflated and devalued, and cynicism, marketability, sophism and social leveraging have quickly risen to take their place. As well, our modern world has never been so… well, modern. Every aspect of our life is, or soon will be, commoditized and technologized.
Communication, information – in short – Digital Technologies – are essentially different from industrial technologies. They create connections, bridges, standard and accessible languages enabling (though not necessarily actualizing) different viewpoints to come into dialogue with each other, new formats of communication, new ontologies of information making possible wholly new concepts of interaction between cognition and data, appearance and content, identity and sociality.
I see this movement of ‘coming together’ occuring in every single area of society and self – ‘within’ as well as ‘without’ the sphere of digital communications. As I mentioned above, I believe these digital technologies are enabling new forms and new concepts – but they are enabling them also because human cognition is undergoing a similar shift. In essence, technology and human cognition/consciousness are in a co-evolutionary movement. One enables and is enabled by the other.
Therefore, I believe that in investigating technology and media, we cannot find answers by focusing on technology – there are much larger questions at work. Like many others, I am drawn to understanding in greater detail the changes that digital representation and manipulation are bringing in forms of aesthetic perception, cognitive abilities, social nuances, communicative possibilites, and their implications on questions of human identity, meaning, and being.
However, obviously, the second side of this equation is that the further enmeshed we become, the more exposed we are to manipulation, deceit and control. Widespread enslavement to the consumerist ideology is a cherished ideal and strongly promoted. Therefore, I feel that one of the most urgent and critical issues that we are facing is to understand in what ways technology creates us, and in what ways we create technology.
Whenever we create a technological object, product service or environment, it does not stop there. Technology, unlike tools, is not self-contained. They interact with many other aspects of the environment – and the good technologies, the strong technologies, the technologies that survive, are also technologies that have a great deal of impact on all of those other aspects: political, economical, cognitive, social, psychological, and beyond…
There are many corners of investigation that I feel drawn to. At present, though, I can focus this on digital representation of information – i.e., Human-Computer Interface.
I believe this is presently an undervalued topic of theoretical, cultural and even philosophical study. As the point of contact for the largest number of machines and humans, this has enormous import regarding future developments of technology and humanity.
Continuous innovations in forms of input/output (multi-input touch screens, augmented reality visors and navigation by peripheral vision, tangible computing and haptic interfaces, to name some of the latest trends), ever-developing changes in communication platforms (chats, forums, wikis, blogs, social networks) as well as the enormous advances occurring in graphic rendering, navigation and artificial intelligence in games point to how wildly diverse and difficult to contain this field is.
On the other hand, developments in teaching methods, articulations of digital literacy, aesthetic explorations of the new interactive forms and new cultural phenomena – technological or real world – all point to complementary changes taking place in our flesh and blood thinking and feeling devices.
Towards writing my dissertation proposal, the question for me right now is – what aspect of interface to tackle, and in context of which human field of thought/emotion/experience? I think that part of my dilemma is in how to maintain contact between the larger ideas and the smaller details. Specifically, keeping touch with the place/function of technology in evolution of human consciousness while also delving deeply enough into the specifics of human-computer interaction to be interesting and relevant on that level as well.
At present, I’m looking at two different directions, which I’ll post as academic papers over the next few months. The first is to attempt to look at and articulate the aesthetic moment within interactive works (artistic or gaming), a moment that at best engages multiple aspects of human experience. Specifically, I’ll be using the theory of “Sensitive Spaces” (Sue Cataldi) based largely on Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of the Flesh, to look at the points of turning, the moments of change, that can take place in these interactive spaces.
Secondly, I’d like to further develop a thesis I presented at the Israeli Society of History and Philosophy of Science conference. In an admittedly somewhat presumptuous attempt – I’d like to propose a theoretical synthesis between narratological and ludological structures.
This all sounds pretty vague at present – this is mainly to develop an appetite. Hopefully this will also light a few neurons in kindred brains. Of course, I’ll write about these ideas from different points of view as I continue to develop them; and finally will post the final papers.
Cheers!
