Google glasses – the sociology of sight

One day I had a conversation with myself. Nothing crazy, just the usual pondering between different ideas and trying to go through things in a sort of a semi-dialogue way. If you have been following the blog, you may have noticed that lately I have began reading about cognitive psychology and cognitive science. I am going through several books at the same time just to get as much information in my head as I can.

The conversation between I and I took an unexpected turn when I suddenly remembered Google’s awesome Glass Project. My honest opinion as a tech enthusiast and an entrepreneur is that Google is going to hit gold if the final product will be even half than what was promised. Yes, the world is about to change with these goggles, no question about it. Just look at the Youtube commercial and you will never hold a pair of glasses the same way again.

But hold on, hold on… what exactly is being promised here and at what price? It was this question I and I began thinking, not arguing, about.

In the video we see the Glasses deliver emails, SMS-messages and social media updates as well as maps and other ‘augmented’ reality stuff to the wearer. So, you don’t have to reach in your pocket and look at your cell phone. What does that awkward though mean?

Well, since the beginning of human civilization we have had at least three ways of looking at things. The first is the animal stare of ‘fight, flight or copulate’. That is the essence of our animal side. The second is the mythical gaze when we look at the stars or follow a priest preforming whatever ritual before the tribe. And the third is the theatre view we have when we look at the social world in general.

All these ways of looking have different personal and social meanings. The animal stare helps us orientate to our surroundings and to perform tasks ‘at hand’. This animal stare is very much connected to the rest of our senses and our bodies in general. It is the way we humans touch to world.

The mythical gaze is connected to our mental abilities to imagine and find meanings in pictures and the world we live in. This gaze may be difficult to describe in words and it has a lot to do with how we feel about things.

The theatre view is the way we gather information about more complex social performances. This could actually be a theatre play or newspaper we read now and then. It gives us information on the world in general.

Now, these typifications are my own and they just sprang to mind so there is no science behind here.

If we take these three different ways of seeing and combine them to our very much visual culture, some thoughts come to mind.

We consume visual information. We no longer have things in our real hands and the ‘concrete’ stuff we need to process in order to get ‘real’ things done is very much visual and abstract. We not only need new technical skills but also new ways to understand information. If you – like most of us – feel that you are bombarded with emails, Facebook ‘likes’ and such, you probably have sometimes felt a bit sick because of the overflow of ‘information technology’.

Now, I and I were discussing this particular situation and thinking about the google glasses. I love the idea but I fear there is a certain level of pain coming along with them. By this I mean that we need to immerse ourselves even more with digital streams and abstract meanings with brains that are best apt to process information in the theree previously mentioned ways.

The brain is a physical device so it exists in space and time. The animal stare is for the very fast information concerning questions ilke where, how and when. The mythical stare is slow, perhaps closer to meditation and the theatre view is best understood as an ability to understand social roles and such (for instance, reading a newspaper article gives us a ‘story’ we understand).

The Google glasses – and similar products – destroy all this unless the designers are taking steps to offer the ‘augmented reality’ in an old fashion way.

The glasses is a major step because with them the ‘virtual’ is ever present. The younger generations will be able to grow new neuron links in order to have their brains wiring altered (yes, I believe that will happen) and they will have very different ways of processing information. That is already happening with our technology today.

Older brains are harder to rewire. Just look at how people who have never used a computer mouse has enormous difficulties in getting the simples click ‘click’. Now, imagine the mouse as a link to a virtual world where people who can perform this simple task have unique access to a whole new social world.

We are about to cross an interesting threshold. Once our brains begin to ‘evolve’ with new ways of perception, the following generations may go even further with the human-machine interface thing. I believe – and I have no scientific evidence in support of this – that the hacking of our brain and social relations has started a few decades back and the next decades will very much be about finding out our human restrictions and how to go beyond – and some of us will want to.

The Google search engine is so advanced that it makes us cyborgs

Oh yes. Researching transhumanism does involve a dip into the world of cyborgs. The Wikipedia page I linked here does offer a very good introduction to the topic. Over the past years I have read about cyborgs now and then, but for some odd reason I never really get carried away by the concept. Now, cyborgs are cool. I enjoy the concept, I tend to like them in movies, and I had my greatest role playing adventures as a Solo in the game Cyberpunk 2020. My character was called Charles Remmmington (three M’s there) and it was a really nasty peace of heavy weaponry combined to a very teenage-like associating mind. But, as a research concept I find cyborgs quite boring.

Some years ago I read a great article by a Finnish researcher, Ilkka Mäyrä. In his1997  article Sähködemoni ja koneihminen: matka hyvän ja pahan tuolle puolelle [Electronic Demon and Machine Man: a journey to the other side of good and evil; my translation], Mäyrä analysed the concept of a cyborg in the genre of science fiction. In the article Mäyrä sees technology as an ambivalent phenomenon. In this ambivalence the creations of science fiction and horror literature forces us to meet ‘The Other’ in the character of a ‘cyborg’. The Other is the ‘demon’, the other side of humanity. The article is great and unfortunately it is available only to the Finnish language audience. In short, we are appalled and amazed at the site of the human-machine hybrid.

Another Finnish book about cyborgs was written only some years ago by the prominent Finnish philosopher Timo Airaksinen. Airaksinen develops his ideas about human-machine unions as a concept of a ‘posthuman’. In his book 2006 Ihmiskoneen tulevaisuus [The Future of Machine Humans, my translation] Airaksinen follows a very philosophical path and describes cyborgs in various ways. Airaksinen puts great emphasis on the autonomy of the subject as well as in trying to understand technology in terms relating to human beings.

Of course, there is a lot more written about cyborgs than these two books. In the future I probably have to take a better look at the phenomenon. But, so far cyborgs offer me a great way to pass the time in various thought experiments. Or, they were experiments until I spent an evening searching for information for a blog post I am working on. Like most of us, I use Google to find things out (sic?). As I was typing different search terms, I realized that my relation to this great search engine is not as straight forward I had hoped it to be.

In fact, I now feel, that I am in a way cybogized by the whole thing. And here is why.

Cyborgs are human-machine combinatins. What does that mean? There are two ways to look at this. In Mäyräs article he deals with what called ‘hard science fiction’ that emphasizes a very blunt and strong way humans and machines are woven together. You are a cyborg if you – for instance – have several body parts changed to machine parts or a if a major part of your cognitive abilities are run by computers. In simple terms, a hard way to define a cyborg, is to claim that it really has to be a very big alternation to the ‘natural human condition’. The other way to define cyborgs has been developed by Andy Clark, for instance. Airaksinen refers to Clarks work on a ‘minimum requirement’ for a cyborg. In Clarcs vision anyone who uses glasses (or contact lenses) is in fact a cyborg.

Both these definitions are difficult to narrow down and between them there is a large gray area. As I was doing my Google searches, I noticed some ‘startling’ things (we are expected to be startled by these discoveries but for me, it was not that startling). Anyway, I realized that a lot of my cognitive work was done by the Google search algorithm.

A search engine is designed to make the searching of information easier. To do this, the algorithm has to do a lot of computing in order to ‘ques’ what I may be looking for. Google does a very good job at this. And that also means, that I don’t have to know how certain words are spelled. Google does that for me. Google also analyses my search patterns and makes suggestions based on that analysis. In a way, Google not only thinks for me but also corrects my thinking.

I don’t have to know how ’emancipation’ is written. I just have to write ‘corelatio’ and Google makes sure that very soon I’ll be reading a Wikipedia page about ‘correlations and dependencies’.

So, as the mobile technology gets faster and smarter and as we start ‘wearing’ (Sports Tracker) it and ‘talking’ to it (Siri), we are not really interacting with technology. We are incorporating technology. There is no clear line where technology starts and I stop. There are no two feedback systems in Sports Tracker, there is only one: you and your heart beat monitor, GPS track record and the act of running are one feedback loop that then connects you+technology to the various social networks you ‘share’ your workout to. And Siri. Right now, It takes good pronunciation to get things done, but soon the AI+voice will not only be your ‘friend’ but your ‘inner voice’.

So, cyborgs are not ‘coming’, we are sliding in to a reality where they just ‘are’. Great. I do like the Google example and I have been playing around the concept and doing a lot of interesting tests with the Google search bar. It does excite me a bit and hopefully in the future, I’ll be buzzing about cyborgs even more. Or, maybe I’ll be buzzing AS a cyborg.