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Sam Schuler
[email protected]
WRIT 1133
John Tiedemann
Post-Human Androids: How Google Glass Is Teaching Us a New Way
of Being Human
According to historian Lynn Hunt, the human rights philosophy
that informs the
philosophies, systems of law, and political systems of the
modern Europe and much of
the world is based upon new practices concerning the body (Hunt
2008) that emerged
during the early 18thcentury. Pre-Enlightenment bodies were
understood to be public and
symbolic, valued more for what they represented to the community
than for what they
meant to the individual. However, thanks in part to a vogue for
realist portraiture, Hunt
contends, bodies came to be seen not as public and symbolic but
as private and materially
real. In the 18th
century, it came to be understood that bodily feelings,
especially pain,
belonged only to the sufferer in the here and now. This new
belief in the integrity of
the body (Hunt 2008), according to Hunt, became the basis not
only for the prohibition
of torture but for the idea of individuality that underwrites
modern democratic notions of
autonomy, personal liberty, and private property. If the
popularity of realist portraiture
was in some way responsible for the evolution of the modern
social order, how are
contemporary forms of visual art and technology changing who we
individually and in
society are becoming today?
Consider Google Glass: the computer that you wear like a pair of
glasses, making
your field of vision a computer screen that connects you to the
internet. Google Glass can
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record everything you see and hear and project it to the world
while projecting what
others are recording before your own eyes, all while allowing
you to gather, read, and
view still more information from the web, courtesy of its
voice-activated searching. In
short, to wear Google Glass is to make your body a global,
full-time transmitter and
receiver of symbols.As such, this technology is teaching users
to become a new kind of
human. Whereas the Enlightenment notion of the human that Hunt
analyzed
understood the body to be fundamentally private (i.e., belonging
to the individual, not
society) and real (i.e., not symbolic), Google Glass is teaching
us how to see our bodies
as fundamentally public,i.e., a source and destination for
shared information, and
symbolic,a living repository of representations. This revision
to the experience of may
lead to positive, potentially revolutionary changes in the
social order, encouraging us to
see ourselves not as isolated individuals but as an
interconnected human web. However,
it also threatens equally revolutionary, but potentially
negative changes, too, casting us
into a world where no experience is authentic and where Big
Brother is always our
audience.
