You are your smartphone: digital technologies and the fluid self
At the close of his manifesto attacking the hidden inequality of the open software movement, Jaron Lanier recalls a discovery from his days at the forefront of research into virtual reality (VR). ‘From the outside, you’d have seen these people wearing huge black goggles and gloves encrusted in patterns of weird small electronic components,’ (Lanier, 2010:121). Those wearing the goggles and gloves, however, had a very different view of their physical selves. Using them himself, Lanier was amazed at the speed at which the he became immersed in the scene presented to him: ‘Your brain starts to believe in the virtual world instead of the physical one. There’s an uncanny moment when the transition occurs.’ (Lanier, 2010:122). Lanier’s team achieved this ‘uncanny moment’ partially due to their choice of a control method for the individual ‘in virtual reality’ (ibid.). ‘Full-body suits covered in sensors’ (ibid.) allowed for the natural movement of a person’s avatar in the virtual space: if they lifted their hand, they would see a virtual hand moving in front of them; tilting their head would initiate the same effect in VR as it would in the physical world. In this sense, the immersion into the virtual world is not entirely unexpected: the virtual body moves just as the physical one does.
Lanier’s real fascination came with his response when a bug occurred in the visualization of the virtual body: ‘I distinctly remember a wonderful bug that caused my hand to become enormous, like a web of flying skyscrapers. As is often the case, this accident led to an interesting discovery…It turned out that people could quickly learn to inhabit strange and different bodies and still interact with the virtual world’ (ibid.). Using this realization as a springboard for further experimentation, he and his team found that people could learn to interact with the virtual environment in a wide array of bodies, and even to control extra limbs. ‘There is something extraordinary that you might care to notice when you are in VR, though nothing compels you to: you are no longer aware of your physical body. Your brain has accepted the avatar as your body. The only difference between your body and the rest of the reality you are experiencing is that you already know how to control your body, so it happens automatically and subconsciously.’ (Lanier, 2010:123).
For Lanier, the digital technology presented through VR led to a profound change in his personal understanding of the physical self, leading him to see the physical form as an arbitrary mediator through which the mind functions. The ease at which he found himself and the subjects of his research shape-shifting to embody forms which should have been totally foreign led him to make the following prediction: ‘In the future, I fully expect children to turn into molecules and triangles in order to learn about them with a somatic, “gut” feeling. I fully expect morphing to become as important a dating skill as kissing.’(ibid.).
In evaluating Lanier’s account, we might assume that it is a saturation of the senses that causes the mind to disassociate from the physical body of its ‘owner’. Having experienced this, the VR user is lead to re-evaluate of the physical self as something far more fluid. The majority of digital technologies we encounter on a day-to-day basis, however, do not envelope our senses so fully. If we adopt Miller and Horst’s definition of the digital as ‘anything thing that has been developed by, or can be reduced the binary’ (Miller and Horst, 2012:5), we must try to understand how a wide array of technologies, from immersive three-dimensional worlds to text-based communication, affect the ways in which we understand our physical selves. In this essay, I will draw from a number of theoretical and ethnographic sources in order to evaluate how digital technologies affect the ways in which we understand our physical selves.
Lanier’s first-hand account of his experiences and discoveries when using bears some relation to the work of the philosopher Andy Clark. Clark, in works such as Natural Born Cyborgs (2003) argues that a plasticity of the limits of the human organism is at the centre of our humanity. For Clark, humans are possessed of an innate ability to incorporate the objects with which they interact into their ‘cognitive loop’. Rather than the mind being contained by the body, our thoughts stretch beyond the ‘skin/skull boundary’ (Clark and Chalmers, 1998), and are ‘coupled’ with objects and processes in the outside world, rendering distinctions between them meaningless. ‘The relevant external features are active, playing a crucial role in the here-and-now. Because they are coupled with the human organism, they have a direct impact on the organism and its behaviour.’ (Clark and Chalmers, 1998). Clark, writing with Dave Chalmers, uses a number of real and fictional vignettes to illustrate his point, most memorably that of Otto, a man with Alzheimer’s disease who writes in and consults a notebook to remind him of his thoughts and intentions throughout the day: ‘For Otto, his notebook plays the role played by a biological memory’ (ibid.). In their example, Otto, intending to go to an exhibition at the Museum of Modern art ‘consults his notebook, which says that the Museum 53rd Street, so he walks to 53rd Street and goes into the museum’ (ibid.). In his constant use and consultation of the notebook, Otto’s ‘human organism’, or the mind within the ‘skin/skull boundary’ is coupled with an object beyond it. Without the notebook, Otto’s failing memory acts as a barrier to his ability to enact his intentions and desires: ‘the information in Otto’s notebook…is a central part of his identity as a cognitive agent’ (ibid.). Clark and Chalmers thus argue that Otto is ‘best regarded as an extended system, a coupling of biological organism and external resources’ (ibid.). In this sense, Otto as a physical and mental ‘self’ is inextricable from his notebook: the brain, body and notebook are all elements in a cognitive system that constitutes Otto.
This recalls Marcel Mauss’s Techniques of the Body, in which the author describes the human body as ‘man’s first and most natural instrument’ (Mauss, 1973 [1935], 7), but goes beyond it in establishing ‘external elements’ as of similar, if not equal importance to the body. The use of any instrument, in their view, causes the mind to fill and inhabit it as much as it does the ‘human organism’: thus, they name their hypothesis ‘the extended mind’.
While their focus is on the mind’s coupling with and extension into inanimate objects, such as notebooks, Clark and Chalmers allow for the notion of ‘socially extended cognition’, in which ‘[one’s] mental states [could] be partially constituted by the states of other thinkers’ (Clark and Chalmers, 1998). Here, they make reference to the work of Edwin Hutchins, who sees cognition, particularly in certain situations, as ‘distributed’ rather than simply ‘extended’. This theory is exemplified in a paper co-authored by Tove Klausen, entitled ‘Cockpit Cognition’ (1995). In analyzing video and voice recordings of an airline flight crew within a ‘very high fidelity flight simulator’ (Hutchins and Klausen, 1995:2) for an aeroplane requiring three pilots, they illuminate the interactions that demonstrate the conglomeration of the crew and cockpit technology into a ‘cognitive system’ able to keep a plane in the air. They argue that it is a system of ‘distributed cognition’ which ‘as a whole may still be doing more work than could be done by any individual alone’ (ibid.:7) that allows the flight to take place. This proper functioning of this system relies on the state of mutual understanding between the pilots, the cockpit technology, and the air traffic controllers as the sources of both action and information: a ‘construction of intersubjectively shared understandings [dependent] on a very special distribution of knowledge in the pilot community’ (ibid.:11). In this state, a silent look from the First Officer (F/O) to the Captain can ‘have the meaning of a request for specific information’ (ibid.), information passed on by air traffic control (ATC) will be immediately acted upon, while the physical re-organisation of elements within the cockpit (such as the toggle for the altitude alert system) has the effect of storing information outside of the ‘human organisms’ which can initiate or prevent further interaction.
While Hutchins and Klausen avoid an explicit consideration of the self in their paper, it is clear that the system of distributed cognition responsible for the flight of the plane is densely entangled with the physical self. In an extreme sense, it is the proper functioning of the system as a whole that is responsible for the continuing existence of the physical selves of those on board: if the plane were to crash, the crew and passengers on board are likely to be immediately killed. In another interpretation, the pilots spread their physical selfhood across the system for the duration of the flight, relying on physically presented information, both implicit and explicit, to maintain the plane’s correct path. Without recourse to information gathered and analysed by ‘external elements’, which might be human, analogue or digital (for example, ATC computers and digital radios), their continuing existence as pilots would be impossible.
So far in this essay, I have referred to case studies that may not appear immediately relevant to the question of digital technologies (Otto’s notebook), or which may be considered fairly obscure (VR, ‘Cockpit Cognition’). These examples, however, allow us to plot a framework for the evaluation of more commonplace digital technologies, and the assessment of their effects on the understanding of the physical self against their analogue counterparts.
Much work has been done on the use of avatars in virtual role-playing games such as Second Life (or ‘SL’ ) (Boellstorff, 2008) and World Of Warcraft (or ‘WoW’) (Nardi, 2010). Like Lanier’s VR, these are controlled by physical actions of the human organism. Unlike VR, however, the experience of controlling an avatar is not designed to be a total physical immersion. In many contexts, the avatar will be visible from a ‘third-person’ angle, as if viewed from a helicopter hovering overhead; controlling it is achieved through pressing keyboard buttons in various combinations, and it might be led to interact with external objects in the virtual world by clicking on them with a mouse. Furthermore, the virtual world does not usually fill the user’s entire field of vision, and is normally limited to a small screen in front of them.
Despite these more disassociative methods of control, both Boellstorff and Nardi both provide examples that demonstrate ways in which the use of virtual avatars causes people to re-evaluate their physical personhood. Perhaps most striking comes from a discussion Boellstorff had with one of his informants, whose avatar was a ‘beautiful female’ called Pavia:
‘Tom [Boellstorff], I’m not the person you’ve gotten to know. But at the same time I am. I’m a man in real life, but about three weeks ago I learned that I’m transsexual. Here in second life I created something knew in myself that I never realized was there before. At first it was just role playing… I kept infusing myself into her, but then something unexpected started to happen: Pavia started coming out in the real world. I became her, she became me’ (Boellstorff, 2008: 138).
Using this and other examples, Boellstorff argues that avatars (or ‘alts’) give users an opportunity to have ‘multiple embodiments’, allowing them to conceive of themselves as ‘dividuals’ rather than ‘individuals’ (Strathern, 1988, in Boellstorff, 2008: 150). In the case of Pavia, the user describes how his/her dividual ‘selves’ came to align and incorporate each other more than he/she had expected, leading to this eventual perception of him/herself as transsexual. To develop Boellstorff’s findings further, it seems that this is a case similar to Lanier’s experience of the bug that caused his hand to become a ‘web of flying skyscrapers’, combined with the reflexive understanding of the self realized through coupling with ‘external elements’ described by Clark and Chalmers. The ability of the user controlling Pavia to ‘shape-shift’ into the body of a female acted as a catalyst for a more fluid understanding of the physical self. This, in turn, caused him/her to reevaluate his/her gender in ‘real life’.
In other cases, the changes in the understanding of physical personhood are not so pronounced, but may appear more appropriate to the definition for dividual self that Boellstorff chooses to quote: ‘constructed as the plural and composite site of the relationships that produced them’ (Strathern, 1988:13, in Boellstorff, 2008: 150). Most visibly, in relating her theory of ‘play as an aesthetic experience’, Nardi describes the manner in which relationships between players, and between players and the virtual world are visualized as avatars develop and ‘level’. ‘Players watched the “experience bar” which visualizes experience points. It always satisfyingly, moved upward… Many players started new characters because they liked the leveling process so much’ (Nardi, 2010:40). Other indicators of experience in WoW, such as ‘gear’ (virtual objects won from other players and simulated monsters) and performance meters indicated development through regular playing of the game. These endowed prestige not only to the user’s avatar and to the person assumed to be sitting behind the screen, but also to a larger unit of coordinated players often required to reach new levels, the ‘guild’. In action, guilds may be seen to bear a resemblance to the systems of distributed cognition explained by Hutchins and Klausens. Players within guilds will research and coordinate action for the completion of ‘raids’, relying on the previous experiences of other players, an understanding of the virtual world, and interaction with each other.
As users of both Second Life and WoW continue to play with and develop their avatars, their temporal investment in them (in which their ‘human organism’ is seated at the computer) becomes ever more evident in the appearance of their characters, and their technique in using them (Boellstorff notes a conversation among SL users about ‘newbies’: ‘“appearance, skin, animations”, and “body language…behaviour is a giveaway” (Boellstorff, 2008:124)). These developments are forged through intersubjective relationships with both other players and the programme of the virtual world. In this way, Strathern’s notion of the ‘dividual’ holds true for the use of these digital technologies, with the relationships constituting the divided self constituted through both human and non-human relationships, and made visible in the virtual depiction of the avatars.
The same can be said of other digital technologies which do not call on the users to so obviously role-play, and through which ‘avatars’ are not so consciously used. A simple mobile phone, retaining not only the telephone numbers of those with whom the user has a relationship, but also keeping a record of calls and SMS messages to these individuals, presents the self constituted through a network of relationships in an even more explicit way to avatars in SL and WoW. In memorizing this information, the mobile phone plays a role similar to Otto’s notebook, and its personal ownership and continuous use leads it to become an extension of the self in a similar way. Applications available for smartphones, such as ‘RunKeeper’, enable their users to plan and track routes during exercise, and measure their speed and approximate energy use, allowing for detailed analysis of the ‘human organism’ and its development as though it is a machine to fine-tune. Other applications enable users to improve their ‘productivity’ by distributing aspects of their cognition to specially designed computer programmes: this category currently generates the second most revenue for the Apple App Store in the United States (Source: AppAnnie; http://blog.appannie.com/app-annie-index-market-q1-2013/). The popularity of such technologies supports the findings of Clark and Chalmers and Hutchins and Klausen in their outlining of extended and distributed cognition, while presenting a movement towards a self-perception in which humans can ‘level’ in the physical world.
It is tempting to adopt Boellstorff’s approach to analyzing the personhood of the users of these various digital technologies: to infer Strathern’s ‘dividual’ from the visible division of the self into various virtual ‘alts’ constructed through interaction and relationships. Indeed, the coupling of the self to a variety of digital technologies for different and specific purposes (exemplified not only in the virtual worlds of SL and WoW, but also in the use of applications and computer programmes) supports this notion. In accepting this idea, however, we cannot argue that digital technologies have a particularly powerful effect on the way in which we understand our physical selves: despite becoming aware of their divided selves, users of these technologies continue to perceive themselves as individuals. ‘Pavia’ in Second Life ultimately describes him/herself as ‘a man in real life’ (Boellstorff, 2008: 138); Nafus and Tracey explain how the private use of mobile phones in Britain act as a catalyst in development of the self as an individual (Nafus and Tracey, 2002:212).
What these examples illuminate is a movement towards an understanding of the physical self as more fluid, and flowing. The availability of digital technologies which allow users to visualize their physical and social development creates a tangible sense of a self moving and changing through time. Donning the skins of avatars enables experimentation with different physical forms, and the distribution of cognition through both computer programmes and other humans is made more evident through the use of digital networks. The ideas that, in the 1990s, Clark and Chalmers and Hutchins and Klausen were at pains to relate – that external elements are active in our cognition and self-perception – now feel instinctive rather than a stretch of the imagination. While no single readily-available technology is as immersive as Lanier’s VR headset, the world is now so immersed in varieties of digital technology that our perception of the physical self has almost reached his prediction of shape-shifting: digital technologies have made us more aware of our selves, and more aware of our their ability to change.
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