 |
| Big Kitty is Watching You. (1984 reference!) |
The article “You Are Your Phone”, found in the Explorations
and Provocations folder on MyLearningSpace, exemplifies Slack’s
notion of the Cyborg. Slack, who borrows from McLuhan’s notion of media as an
extension of man, argues that no longer is technology a mere extension of
ourselves, but rather technology and man embody one entity; the concept of
cyborg. I know this has already been discussed in other posts, especially in
connection to the short film Noah,
however, this article calls for more attention to this concept. While this
article exemplifies this cyborg notion successfully, it also illustrates the exploitative
nature of social media and technologies. One key quotation sums up this reality
adequately:
“If the mere tracking of phone
use reveals how we spend our days, our diurnal routines, imagine what would be
revealed by a deeper analysis, one that examined the apps we use, the people we
connect with, the things we look at and listen to, what we say and what we
write and what we like, where we go, what we search for, the photos we take.
It’s all there, public self and private self. There’s no shame in admitting the
fact: You are your phone” (Carr, 2015).
Here, the author validates what users of current
technologies and social media have recently become aware of, we are our
technologies. What we may search for, what we like and dislike, where we may want
to go on vacation... Everything about ourselves is known to the technologies that
most people have become reliant on. As the article notes, most of our phone
usage is unconscious. Not only that, but even if some users do not fully
understand the implications of going online or using their mobile phones, I
would argue that disconnecting completely is the only way to avoid
exploitation. Each time we choose to go online and on our phones, media
companies alike are tracking our every move, from our online behaviour to our
physical presence in order to better understand us and advertise to our very wants, needs, and desires. We are our phones. We are our online social media profiles
and our Google searches. As unfortunate and contentious this may be, our
readings thus far in the course largely support this reality.
What else is left though? If this is our current web 2.0
reality, what is our future with technology going to look like? Will the
information gathered from our usage on the internet and social media platforms continue
to exploit us of our content and personal information? When will it be enough?
I guess time will only tell.
The concept of the cyborg is fascinating to me. Perhaps you are suggesting that humans, individuals must begin to conceptualize ourselves as always-already post-human -- that is, a Slack suggests, we are *man* and machine, not *man* simply using machines. In this respect, we could articulate our experiences with machines like social media and cellphones as aposteriori -- contingent on processes of power, existing in tandem with each other. In this respect, we could never disconnect from this technological reality -- nor do I think that is possible to begin with. Our lives are constructed in relationship to technology -- television, medicine, clean water, automobiles. I think instead of entertaining the idea that we can disregard technology, we should rather put our lives and social practices into articulation with it -- just as Slack and Wise suggest.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteErica, Karly, and Nicholas Carr point to an interesting idea about the relationship between humans and phones. To further the discussion, I want to point out some of the problems that I found with Carr’s post “You are Your Phone”. More specifically, I want to focus on the following part of Carr’s post:
ReplyDelete“For exploring checking behaviours,” the researchers [Andrews et al.] report, “estimated number of uses show little reliability for measuring actual uses.” We see here how deeply entwined the phone has become with the self — a seamless extension of body, mind, and personality. It is so much a part of us that we are no more conscious of the device moment-to-moment than we are of, say, our hands.
Carr’s argument here is misguided. For one, Carr cherry-picks from Andrews et al.’s (2015) study. While Andrews et al. claim that “people have little awareness of the frequency with which they check their phone”, they also point out that people have reasonable awareness of how much time they use their phone during a day.
Carr’s claim about phones-as-extensions falters in two other ways. First, it does not follow from the fact that I am unaware of how many times I actually check my phone during a day that I am also unaware of using my phone in, as Carr puts it, the “moment-to-moment”. The former depends on the act of remembering, whereas the latter does not.
Second, Andrews et al.’s study has little to say about users’ qualitative engagement with their phones. Put differently, while a person may not be able to tell you how many times they used their phone in a day, it remains to be determined by further empirical research if people can reliably recall the ways in which they use their phone during a day. (My hunch is that people are more aware of the ways in which they use their phone in a day than how many times they check their phone in a day.)
The purpose of my post is to point out that it is a stretch for Carr to move from the claim that “users do not accurately report how many times they use their phone during a day” to a claim about “how deeply entwined the phone has become with the self — a seamless extension of body, mind, and personality”. Accordingly, I want to ask “how might we make a stronger argument for the phone as an extension of the self?”