How did you get here? I mean here, specifically, reading this email.
I ask for two reasons. One, I’m curious! I always want to know how people end up reading the things we publish. Two, I think it’s important that you really think about how you click on stuff online, and why you click on some things and not others.
Not to say that you’re being completely manipulated by the things you see online, of course, just as you’re not going to buy every product you see advertised on a billboard. The point is more that the act of using a computer or smartphone means you’re dealing with a world constructed to encourage some things, even if you don’t know you’re being nudged in a certain direction. This is the same as real-world things like supermarkets and malls, which are designed to convert passing foot traffic into retail sales. Researchers use visual cues, ambient noise, smells, even the infrastructure and architecture of the buildings themselves to turn your personal habits into their money.
I wrote about this a few years ago, back when Facebook admitted to running (poorly-designed) psychological experiments on users. The essential issue here is that the things that act as public space online actually aren’t, and that has all kinds of ramifications for privacy, security, corporate power, and so on. We can see this most recently in how extremist political groups are able to organize online so effectively precisely because there is no real incentive for the companies who own these spaces to stop them organizing at the expense of their business model. As John Hermann writes in that NYT piece, the social web “felt and functioned like freedom, but it was always a commercial simulation.”
So, when I asked how you got to this email, this is the kind of thing I was hoping you’d think about—especially because this isn’t just a web thing. As media theorist Marshall McLuhan argued half a century ago, this process happens with every new transformative communicative technology, from the printing press to the smartphone. His famous aphorism that “the medium is the message” refers to how the consequences of a new technology aren’t so much about the things being said with it, but with knock-on social, political, and economic effects that it introduces.
Smartphones are the most recent example of something truly revolutionary in scale, like the web before them, or television, or the telegram. And, as with the social web, it’s easy to latch onto the obvious things that we do with our new devices as the most immediately important consequences of using them—worrying about how we might be sitting up late at night flicking that Twitter feed down over and over again just for a hit of new information. Or that ghostly buzz in your bag. My phone was vibrating, right? It must be. I haven’t checked it for a few minutes...
These black slabs of glass and silicon are the focal point for a range of psychological anxieties. Seriously investigative and unseriously scaremongering writers and scientists have made careers from worrying about what they’re doing to our brains. Are they destroying our attention spans? Are they responsible for enabling cyberbullying and harassment? What are they doing to our mental health?
Smartphones are the latest in a long line of technologies which allow us to outsource our mental labor, a category of tool as old as the written word. But smartphones are also, like the social web, a kind of private technology that can mislead us for nefarious ends. You can trust a piece of paper to be a piece of paper, but you can’t really trust a smartphone to just be a phone, or a map, or a newspaper, even if it is all of those things at once.
Our previous episode of the Human Machine was all about the speculative future of sense augmentation; our next episode, by Kieran Yates and out on Tuesday, August 29, will be about smartphones as brain augmentation, and about where we should focus our ethical concerns about how we use and rely on them.
The design choices of the people who sell us these products have ethical consequences, after all. Kieran’s piece will look most closely at younger people, because they’re always the age cohort on which moral panics concentrate. Those panics can tend to focus on the terror of concepts like “brain rewiring.” What’s really important is not whether our brains are changing, but who’s doing the changing, and to what ends.
So, this week in the Human Machine Reading Club, we’re going to be looking at discussions of what it means to have part of your brain outside your body.”
Here’s what’s on the reading list this week:
- READ: Michael Lynch in the Guardian on how threats to smartphone privacy are de facto threats to our sense of bodily autonomy:
“What and how I know it is part of my mind; but if what and how I know is partly composed of what happens on my phone, if it is “spread out” in that way, then unlocking our devices is not simply like unlocking our house. It is more like opening up our minds to Vulcan mind melds. And then the ethical question here can’t just be decided by tallying up the consequences; what harms our identity is a matter of principle.”
This piece also acts as a nice introduction to the “extended mind” idea in philosophy of thought, which “that an agent’s mind and associated cognitive processing are neither skull-bound nor even body-bound, but extend into the agent’s world.”
- READ: Bianca Bosker on “The Binge Breaker” — a profile of former Google “product philosopher” Tristan Harris, who has taken it upon himself to crusade against our collective addiction to our smartphones. Interesting both as a profile and as an insight into what the people who make these devices think about their functions and drawbacks:
“Harris learned that the most-successful sites and apps hook us by tapping into deep-seated human needs. When LinkedIn launched, for instance, it created a hub-and-spoke icon to visually represent the size of each user’s network. That triggered people’s innate craving for social approval and, in turn, got them scrambling to connect. ‘Even though at the time there was nothing useful you could do with LinkedIn, that simple icon had a powerful effect in tapping into people’s desire not to look like losers,’ Fogg told me. Harris began to see that technology is not, as so many engineers claim, a neutral tool; rather, it’s capable of coaxing us to act in certain ways. And he was troubled that out of 10 sessions in Fogg’s course, only one addressed the ethics of these persuasive tactics. (Fogg says that topic is ‘woven throughout’ the curriculum.)”
- READ: “What Would McLuhan Say about the Smartphone?” by Isabelle Adams. Media theorist Marshall McLuhan wrote much on the interaction between the human body and brain and the technologies that surround us. In this essay, Adams, applies McLuhan’s “tetrad” analysis — basically, a process for assessing the impact of a new technology — to the smartphone.
It’s a quick introduction to a) McLuhan’s work in this field, and b) the specific issues around smartphones that we’re concerned with, especially as an extension of the body:
“People delegate their memory demands to devices like the smartphone, since an answer to nearly any question can usually be found on the internet (thanks to Google, Wikipedia etc.), which is always at hand with a smartphone. In addition, memories are shared on the internet due to social media (Facebook, twitter, youtube etc.), creating a collective memory.
In addition, smartphones can also operate applications that support the memory, for example, the ‘Shazam’ application recognizes songs, the calendar application reminds one of appointments, and the navigator helps one find a way.”
McLuhan’s full 1964 text, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, is available to read as a pdf. You do not have to read this for the discussion! But if you want to go to the source and really dive into how McLuhan thought of technology as “extensions” and/or “amputations” of humanity, dive in.
Let me know what you think over at the Human Machine group on Facebook, where we’ll be talking through some of these concepts. Just, y’know, remember to take a screen break every now and again.
Until next time,
Ian
|
