Post-Human: Are We there Yet?
- Image via Wikipedia
I came across an article in The Washington Post this evening regarding technology, its role in our lives and what it’s doing to us and where it’s leading us. It’s very short but brings up some valid observations.
Technology has drawn us into our interconnected webs, in the office, on the street, on the park bench, to the point that we exist virtually everywhere except in the physical world. Robert Harrison, a professor of Italian literature at Stanford University, laments that when students pass through the school’s visually stimulating campus, iPhones, BlackBerrys and all the evolving devices and apps draw them into their blinkered personal realms. “Most of the groves, courtyards, gardens, fountains, artworks, open spaces and architectural complexes have disappeared behind a cloaking device, it would seem,” he writes in his book “Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition.”
Actually, we have become symbionts, says Katherine Hayles, author of “How We Became Posthuman.” Just as a lichen is the marriage of a fungus and an algae, we now live in full partnership with digital technology, which we rely on for the infrastructure of our lives. “If every computer were to crash tomorrow, it would be catastrophic,” she says. “Millions or billions of people would die. That’s the condition of being a symbiont.”
Hayles is among a number of intellectuals who see this dependence as not necessarily bad, but as advancing civilization and, above all, just inevitable. “From Thoreau on, we have had this dream we can withdraw from our technologies and live closer to the natural world, and yet that’s not the cultural trajectory that we have followed,” says Hayles, a professor of literature at Duke University. “You could say when humans started to walk upright, we lost touch with the natural world. We lost an olfactory sense of the world, but obviously bipedalism paid big dividends.”
She argues that this has actually made us more aware of our surroundings because so many devices are driven by their location and the user’s awareness of place. “The BlackBerry might be looking for a local restaurant and a person two blocks away, not overseas. If you’re walking downtown and you can access information that’s been tagged there, that information suddenly becomes part of that location.”
You can read the entire article here.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot, especially the last quote; about how you can access information about a piece of space you’re physically residing in at the moment. It’s called augmented reality and will quickly become ubiquitous, probably in less than five years would be my guess. Make sure to click that link to the Wikipedia article about it. You can also read about what Google is doing with their new service Google Goggles.
Do I feel disconnected from nature as this article seems to suggest? Not at all. Because I ask myself, frequently, what is nature? Aren’t we humans a part of nature, no matter what we do, what we create and what we ultimately evolve to? Is an urban concrete jungle a part of nature? Yes. It is, but it’s humanity’s addition to nature.
I don’t believe that we need to reconnect with nature in anyway. I think that with technology, we are connecting to nature in a way that has never been done before. Technology itself is neutral. Technology is not the question here, it’s how we’re using these tools that’s the question. Technology is just the extension of our senses and that’s the scary part. We are augmenting our nervous systems and ultimately our bodies.
I think that this evolutionary path of complete technological integration is unavoidable, of course, but I also believe that everything is on track, according to some predetermined or destined goal, but I come to a dead stop when I try to think of what this end goal is. It could be a myriad of things but I, for one, cannot wait to find out what it is and am also ecstatic to be alive at a time like this.
