User:Francg/expub/media-writing/draft-21June

Draft 3

How digital devices are changing our memory, bodies or emotions?
Are technologies an extension of evolutionary systems of life?
Are we turning into trans-biological species in the search of morphological freedom?
Super-human vs Trans-human

How digital devices are changing our memory?

We do appreciate memory more because we do not train our memory enough. When we use digital technology to store information we are becoming cyborgs; the person who’s physiological functioning like the brain is enhance by a mechanical device; for instance, the phone is an external memory system. There are mental and physical tool extensions of the self that are getting more powerful and smaller. We don’t take the time to notice them while they encourage us to store a lot more of information. We are collectively loosing our ability to remember, because we don’t have to anymore. We are storing memory in devices (also known as the google effect).

We overemphasize the bad in the past, when in fact when we look to past personal archives (old emails or photographs) we can actually become more sympathetic with ourselves. Archiving our own material, photos, tweets and emails might give an impressive digital reminder of the self.
One of the main functions of the memory system is to forget. David Carmel neuroscientist http://edinburgh.academia.edu/DavidCarmel
The brain is not a memory machine, it’s a behavior machine, it’s there to enable us to retain what is important to adapt to the World. If people are moving away from memorizing things…
Do we really understand what our technology is for?
Do we become techno-fundamentalists? Douglas Rushkoff media theorist. http://www.rushkoff.com/ our whole World is programmed in one way or another, not just computer programmers, or architects, or politicians, etc. people weren’t having this basic inside about technology. Book: “Program or be programmed. Ten Commands for a Digital Age”
Digital technology is embedded with purpose, but sometimes these technologies have tendencies without intention when combining with human behavior.
Tom Chatfield has written about people’s relationships and technology: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/20/humans-machines-technology-digital-age. Certain kinds of challenge of uncertainty like digital games, free of the restrictions of the digital World, for instance E-mails, a lot of unintended consequences inside its setup for a lot of people, it’s like a game getting the box empty.
We use technology to ease what we want to do. People have to come to understand that on the other side of the website, text or email there is a person. Technology is mediating our interaction because it is easy to deal with a machine. We have control over it, we can switch it off, but we turn to Google to give us the answers, we look to Facebook to connect with a friend or go to Amazon to get the best deal, we ask the magic machine for something and it delivers, following its advice often unquestionably. We need to understand better how to push buttons. We have to be aware what the system wants in order to be able to play this game. But absence doesn’t seem to be a solution. We need to implement them consciously having knowledge how this technology works instead of passively like robots.
A worldwide communication which networked allowed to communicate people instantly. A technological subculture with its own vocabulary was establishing by itself.
Tom Standage, digital editor of The Economist. “The Return of the Machinery Question” Article. http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21700761-after-many-false-starts-artificial-intelligence-has-taken-will-it-cause-mass and other articles at http://www.economist.com/search?q=tom%20standage Some of the technologies we rely on, have their urgency in something unexpectedly. For instance, text messaging is the further world’s most significant mass communication. The fundamental needs of social exchange has become written rather than spoken, the building blocks of emotional relationships fits perfectly about people seeking out tools that serve them.
Kevin Kelly https://www.ted.com/speakers/kevin_kelly. Our technology behaves different than a standalone hammer, all the techs together makes this vast super system he calls “technion” has an extension of the behavior of the evolutionary system of life. It behaves like things actually evolves, it is close to a living like system than a machine. He suggests technology has its own impulses for survival, though not in an unconscious way.
Now that we have digital technologies we can see the expressions of the human needs, like a nervous system. Cities are for instance the largest technologies we have, it represents what technology gives us, a positive net good, automation systems, neighborhood impacts in our lives, etc. This technology is causing something particularly difficult to be fully understood. We suffer from fetishising the tools themselves. We shall not expect technology to solve the World’s problems neither to solve ours by getting rid of it. We have to critically think how do we integrate digital technologies in our lives. They shape us as much as we shape them, it is a symbiosis. What it is that we welcome in our lives then?
Are we becoming everyday cyborgs?
A body which physiological functioning is dependent upon electronic or mechanical devices. In 1960 self regulating human machine system for exploring the space, its concept was then popularly extended. Rob Spence is one eyed filmmaker who has a prosthetic eye with an embedded video camera in it. http://www.eyeborgproject.com/
People have always made tools for self-created expression. The desire to enhance yourself, what is a super human? Physical experimentation might feel still a little bit taboo. How to regulate one’s emotions? Deep brain stimulation DBS, a small device controlling thoughts implanted inside the skull. When cybernetics are united to an organism, when a transformation is complete is someone more or less human? Does it lead us to a questioning of the human? The trans-human is a link between being biological species to trans-biological, or also called morphological freedom. It is a specific right of body or mind enhancement, though as cultural perspective no one is to decide what is coerce to someone else.
There are many different ways in which people are cyborgs; people wake up next to their phones, connecting them to their social reality, symbiotically exchanging information with this device that is connected to someone else, we are part of a simulated reality, we are merged in the content of the device, and because we are so used to it we have embodied that into our natural behavior, becoming part of our daily lives, and it is not until we cannot make use of our device that we realize how much dependent we are on it.
Superhuman exhibition https://wellcomecollection.org/whats-on/exhibitions/superhuman
Daniel Glaser: Are we trying to make ourselves better or to become something else? With mobile phone technology and the Internet, am I more me or am I something else entirely? That sense of identity what am I striving to be, it is part of the question.