Philosophy 101E

How to stop worrying and love the Internet

by Douglas Adams

Because the Internet is so new we still don’t really understand what it is. We mistake it for a type of publishing or broadcasting, because that’s what we’re used to. So people complain that there’s a lot of rubbish online, or that it’s dominated by Americans, or that you can’t necessarily trust what you read on the web. Imagine trying to apply any of those criticisms to what you hear on the telephone. Of course you can’t ‘trust’ what people tell you on the web anymore than you can ‘trust’ what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants. Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do. For some batty reason we turn off this natural scepticism when we see things in any medium which require a lot of work or resources to work in, or in which we can’t easily answer back - like newspapers, television or granite. Hence ‘carved in stone.’ What should concern us is not that we can’t take what we read on the internet on trust - of course you can’t, it’s just people talking - but that we ever got into the dangerous habit of believing what we read in the newspapers or saw on the TV - a mistake that no one who has met an actual journalist would ever make. One of the most important things you learn from the internet is that there is no ‘them’ out there. It’s just an awful lot of ‘us’.

I made the point today that we are embodied on the internet. I hadn’t planned to discuss this, so my response was a bit scattered (stream of consciousness, heh). Let me try to make it a bit clearer:

We are embodied on the internet. Technology doesn’t simply extend our capacities, but it also changes the kinds of environments in which we act. This in turn changes the kinds of actions that are required for engaging in those environments. Sometimes this results in actions that are very different from the kinds of behaviors we make while engaging nature, but that doesn’t make them any less engaged actions.

It is harder for Dreyfus to make his arguments about technology stick now days, because the technology we use today is literally engaging our bodies in ways it never could before. Take a look at any video on YouTube that shows people using the Wii. These people are clearly engaged with their whole bodies.

But there is a sense in which the Wii example is too easy and superficial. I think it is better to think of the skill required to navigate any complicated website or program. Think about people who use Photoshop, or Final Cut, or any other big, complicated program. It is impossible to doubt that there is a learned skill involved in using this kind of software. It is something that requires practice and training; its the kind of thing that some people are better at than others. But Dreyfus’ argument is that skills are acquired through the use of the body. If he’s right, then we must be embodied when we are using these programs.

Or think about all the social rules and norms involved in interacting with any online community- your favorite message boards; Facebook; MySpace; Wikipedia; this blog. These are all very complicated social environments. We all have some sense of what is appropriate for these environments, and what is inappropriate, and how to behave. Some people do it better than others. MySpace is full of social cues- music, backgrounds, images, links, friends, etc. MySpace is just like a fashion accessory to your online identity.

If these places on the Internet are really environments that take skill to navigate, then you must conclude that we are embodied on the internet. If that’s the case, then the Internet doesn’t pose a threat to our humanity. At most it poses a threat to our current understanding of ourselves and our environment, because in a real sense it changes what we are, and what we interact with. But that doesn’t undermine our humanity; it reaffirms it.

Facebook and MySpace users aren’t examples of people who despise the body, or who think that the body is obsolete. They are people who desperately want to integrate these new possibilities and forms of expression into their lives. They are people who want to make their online identity real and meaningful and relevant. They are people who are trying to find a stable social environment, not just as an abstract mind or identity, but as a real person.

University of Southern California’s Annenberg Center for the Digital Future recently released a study of of online relationships. Here are some highlights:

Ars Technica: We love our Internet friends, really.

Online friends are just as important to people as their offline friends, according to the results of a recent survey.

[…]

The survey included 2,000 households in the US and defined an online community as “a group that shares thoughts or ideas, or works on common projects, through electronic communication only.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, well over half of those participating in online communities reported doing so at least once a day. 70.4 percent “sometimes or always” interact with other members while logged in.

The report also found that as Internet users increasingly use the web to socialize, they also translate those online social connections to real-life activities. 20.3 percent of those who participate in online communities also participate in offline activities related to the online community at least once a year… Similarly, 40 percent of the respondents reported being more involved in social activism since they began to participate in online communities, with two thirds of those involved with social causes saying that they are now involved in activities because of the Internet.

What might be a surprise, though, is that all of this online interaction is apparently not detracting from interaction with close friends and family offline. While 37.7 percent of respondents said that the Internet helps them communicate more with family and friends, “almost all” users reported that increased Internet interaction has no effect on the amount of time spent with those people in real life.

[…]

Most importantly, the report says that 43 percent of those who participate in online communities feel “as strongly” about their online buddies as those offline. What this shows is that—due to the proliferation of chat rooms, blogs, sites like MySpace, forums, games, virtual worlds, and other communities online—Internet users are reaching out to more people, not less, as technology critics have feared.

Take that, Dreyfus.

We discussed in class about how Dreyfus thought that technology could possibly cause us to lead lives without meaning. Daniel summed up Dreyfus’s views by saying something along the lines of whatever hugs do for people, e-hugs will never be able to. I think Dreyfus meant for this statement to be hypothetical, but with advances in technology, the actual idea of an e-hug is becoming more and more plausible.

The appropriately named company CuteCircuit has several projects in the works that attempt to make technology more user friendly. Most of their projects incorporate some type of computing device into clothing. In this sense, we are coming that much closer to being one with technology, as Clark thinks. The most interesting and pertinent piece that they are working on now is the Hug Shirt. This is their description:

“The Hug Shirt is a shirt that makes people send hugs over distance! Embedded in the shirt there are sensors that feel the strength of the touch, the skin warmth and the heartbeat rate of the sender and actuators that recreate the sensation of touch, warmth and emotion of the hug to the shirt of the distant loved one.”

You can send and receive hugs through normal cell phones. The shirt “encodes” the hug before sending it out to whomever you choose. While this won’t be exactly like a real hug, it’s the next best thing to receiving a real one when you’re restrained distance. It’s a warm gesture that expresses how one feels. Besides, it’s the thought behind the action that really counts.

In addition, Cisco System has developed a conference system called TelePresence. It promises to bring people together even across great distances. The video pretty much explains everything.

With these new technologies emerging, we can now find out what their true potentials really are instead open ended debates with no resolution. Even though these existing technologies may not be able to prove Dreyfus wrong, we will be able to learn from these devices’ shortcomings and continually improve upon them. Maybe someday, e-hugs will be able to do whatever real hugs can.

Use this thread to discuss any of the issues raised in class today: Net Neutrality, Wikipedia, Blogjects and the ‘Network of Things’, and Squarepusher’s idea of machine collaboration.

A few links. Don’t take my word on the Net Neutrality debate, it is worth doing research on your own. Here’s some of the links I put on the handout today:

Wikipedia:

   Nature: Internet encyclopedias go head to head
Cnet News: “Is Wikipedia safe from libel?” 12/7/2005    
Wikipedia class action lawsuit
Entity-hood (my commentary)

Google and Internet Neutrality
Google Blog: “Vint Cerf speaks out on net neutrality” 11/8/2005
Networking Pipeline: “Google: We wont pay broadband cyberextortion” 1/18/2006
Neutral Thoughts (my commentary)
Anti-net neutrality ad (paid for by the telecommunications companies)

Tiered Internet
Information Week: “Verizon Says Google, Microsoft Should Pay For Internet Apps” 1/5/2006
Ars Technica: “Monitoring traffic to nickel and dime you” 10/24/2005
Ars Technica: “FTC states in principle that ISPs should not block access to lawful Internet content” 12/28/2005
Quality Optional (my commentary)

In our last class before Thanksgiving break, Daniel had us debate the arguments between Dreyfus and Clark.  Since we ran out of time, we did not get a chance to get to Daniel’s last point in the debate which was about Wikipedia and who would argue for or against it.

Clark would say that Wikipedia is a non-biological construct in the world around us that does help us store more information.  According to Clark, once technology is integrated, you come to trust it in the same way you trust your body.  Wikipedia can then be associated with the human brain and memory.  Your brain stores and retains information which can be changed at any time.  Also, false or distorted information can be stored in the brain sometimes.  Since Wikipedia is a compilation of data that anyone can edit, it is similar to the human brain in that any information can be added or stored and there is a possibility of false or distorted information since anyone can edit Wikipedia.  This can relate to the extended mind thesis; just because an action is mediated by technology doesn’t make them any different.  The only problem is that the internet is not supposed to be part of the extended mind thesis because it is unreliable.  Although the internet is unreliable and Wikipedia is part of the internet, I believe that you can make the argument that the human brain is also unreliable.  For example, if there is a bank robbery, eyewitness accounts are always different among all of the innocent bystanders.  Since the human brain and Wikipedia alike are both subject to error, I believe that they can still be related and Clark would advocate the point that Wikipedia helps us with the storage of information.

Dreyfus, on the other hand, would disagree with that argument.  Dreyfus stated “if our body goes, so does relevance, skill, reality, and meaning.”  Considering Wikipedia as an extended part of the human brain is definitely not what Dreyfus has in mind.  He believes that considering something such as Wikipedia as the brain would cause humans to be less real and lose meaning.  Since there is no interaction with other human beings or any first hand experience in looking up things on Wikipedia, it cannot be part of us.  The information stored on Wikipedia is outside, unreliable information that can be wrong.  Dreyfus believes the information supplied on the internet cannot substitute for the human interaction.  Learning at a school, for example, causes students to discuss and validate their information.  Since Wikipedia is not validated, it can contain false information. As the saying goes, false knowledge is worse than no knowledge at all.

I began to flip through the pages of On the Internet today, and I discovered some really interesting ideas. First and foremost, like Daniel mentioned before, we can tell that this book is pretty outdated. The author, Dreyfus, predicts that the internet will bring “a new era of economic prosperity, lead to the development of intelligent search engines that will deliver to us just the information we desire, solve the problems of mass education, put us in touch with all of reality, allow us to have even more flexible identities than we already have and thereby add new dimensions of meaning to our lives.” We know that all of these predictions have already been made true. The second point I noticed was just that, his predictions have already come true. For a perspective published in 2001 to predict the next generation of search engines, a generation which will “allow us to have even more flexible identities than we already have and thereby add new dimensions of meaning to our lives.” This was a bold prediction for its time that we know to be a reality today with companies such as Google that were only in their infancy in 2001. A company like Google does give us a flexible identity with the ability to retrieve email from anywhere on the globe, research topics with the click of a button, and post dynamic content for the world to see. In the words of Hubert Dreyfus it really does bring “new meaning to our lives”. Another thing to think about is that Dreyfus presents a major question in the introduction, which seems to be the premise behind his book: is it possible to transcend the limits imposed on us by our body, as the internet promises, and still hold onto our relevance, skill, reality, and meaning?