The “transcoding” (Manowich) of society along the lines of digital media and computer networks can be considered revolutionary. One of the important consequences of the digital media revolution is the transformation of age-old communication structures. Human society has long been structured by either one-to-one interaction or, as soon as the number of people involved in interaction no longer permits everyone to speak to everyone, by one-to-many, that is, top-down, hierarchical communication. The digital communication revolution may be considered a revolution precisely because asymmetric, one-to-many communication and the hierarchical social structures which for centuries have been a precondition of cooperative action in larger groups is no longer the only means of constructing social order and in many areas is becoming increasingly inefficient. Above the level of face-to-face interaction, that is, on the levels of groups, organizations, institutions, and social systems, communication need no longer be hierarchical. The affordances of digital media modify the spatial and temporal parameters of communication such that it has now become possible for communication to take place in the mode of many-to-many, whereby, as Actor-Network Theory points out, not only human, but also non-human actors participate in communication. This means that social structures must no longer be vertical processes for producing, distributing, and controlling information.
Category Archives: Mixed Reality
Where do you want to go today? Space as Interface
Microsoft introduced the Internet to the world in 1994 with the slogan: “Where do you want to go today?” Everyone who booted up Windows 95 was routinely asked this question. Although the Mad Men did not consider this global image advertising campaign a great success, Microsoft’s slogan says something philosophically important about the digital media revolution. Digital media, and above all the Internet, have something to do with space, with where you are and where you are going. The importance of new media for the concept of space has for the most part been formulated in negative terms. Digital media are said to annihilate space, to shrink great distances to the movement of a computer mouse, and create a networked global space – Castells speaks of a “space of flows” – in which everything and everyone are open and available all the time. This is indeed what Microsoft is saying; you can go anywhere; there are no limits to movement, space is no longer a barrier or a hindrance to communication, flows of information, and cooperation. In the Internet space is replaced by cyberspace, a virtual reality, a paradoxical expanse containing the whole world in the dimensionless realm of bits and bytes. Much has been written about the dangers and advantages of cyberspace. In the meantime, so-called virtual reality has become so important for work, shopping, business, education, and all other areas of life that it cannot be thought of as a domain of its own, somehow separated from the “real” world. Physical space and cyberspace have merged to become what could be called a “mixed reality.” But how are we to understand space when it is mixture of contradictory elements. Is the philosophy of space after the advent of digital media doomed to speak of a spaceless space similar to what Castells has called the “timeless time” of the network society?
Being-as-Other, the Hermeneutical “as” and New Media
Can one interpret the AIME project (An Inquiry into Modes of Existence www.modesofexistence.org) from the point of view of communication theory?
Latour doesn’t use the term “communication,” – the term doesn’t appear in the Glossary of AIME which is odd considering for both Habermas and Luhmann communication is the very definition of the social – but a link appears when Latour proclaims that “beings utter themselves.” Another word for self-utterance is taken from semiotics, “enunciation,” which in AIME amounts to an “articulation” of continuity under the regime of time, of discontinuity, hiatus, indeed, of being-as-other. The “as” in this foundational term of the AIME metalanguage cannot help but recall the hermeneutical “as” in Philosophical Hermeneutics. Just as for Heidegger, Gadamer and Ricoeur Being is meaning, so for AIME “being and enunciation can almost be taken to be synonymous since it is the nature of a being to utter itself, to exist, to transit, to throw itself forward through the hiatus of existence or expression.”
The Ontological Interpretation of Privacy
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Luciano Floridi is one of the few philosophers of the digital age who radically reinterprets issues such as informational privacy on basis of an informational ontology (see The Ontological Interpretation of Informational Privacy, in: Ethics and Informational Technology, 2006). Being is information. The world consists of information and not things or people. People do not possess their personal information, they are their personal information. Privacy therefore should not be understood as an issue of possession and control of data, but as a matter of personal integrity. Stealing and misusing personal data should not be compared to stealing and misusing someone’s possessions, for example, their automobile, but instead to kidnapping. My data is not the same as my auto, but rather much more like my body.
If information is a state of being and not a state of having, then what constitutes privacy? Floridi defines privacy in terms of the “ontological friction” regulating the flow of information in the “infoshpere.” The more friction blocking, disturbing, slowing down, and attenuating the flow of information, and the more effort it takes to bridge the gaps between information, the more privacy can be ascribed to information. Correspondingly, the less the flow of information is regulated, slowed down, hindered, the less this information can be considered private. Private and public are not different spaces, for example, the privacy of my home as opposed to public spaces like the shopping center or the train station. Digital media do not knock at the door and ask permission before entering. They are ubiquitous. Privacy is neither a space, nor a thing, but a state of being.
Layers and Filters
In the wake of the digital revolution networking breaks out of traditional spatial and temporal limitations on access to information and cooperative action such that new and unforeseen possibilities emerge. Communication and action have traditionally been conditioned by spatial, temporal, and physical or bodily parameters. What could be perceived, known, and communicated and the conditions of action were determined largely by the physical “context,” the place and time where an actor was bodily present. Someone standing on a street corner in Lower Manhattan experiences a different world, has access to different information, and has different possibilities of action, then someone herding goats in the Pyrenees. The information available to these persons and the opportunities of action open to them is of course also determined by their education, the location of the nearest library, the available means of transportation, and the time, effort, and cost required to contact someone in order to get an answer to a question, initiate a financial transaction, coordinate cooperative action and so on. In the network society these spatial, temporal, and physical conditions are no longer the primary parameters of knowing and acting. Instead reality presents itself as a play of layers and filters.