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Sam Schuler
[email protected]
WRIT 1633
John Tiedemann
iHumanism: How Google Glass Is Teaching Humans a New Way of
Being
Historian Lynn Hunt argues that the idea of “the human”
underlying human rights
philosophy is not grounded in a natural human essence;
rather, early 18th
-century middle class
Europeans learned new ways of being human by
interacting with cultural artifacts such as the
epistolary novel and realist portraiture (Hunt 2008). Through
the use of first-person narrative,
epistolary novels such as Richardson’s Pamela granted
middle-class readers entry into the
interior lives of the working classes, thus teaching readers the
emotion of empathy. This new
emotion, Hunt argues, taught the middle classes to perceive, in
Thomas Jefferson’s words, “that
all men are created equal.” Similarly, Hunt argues, the vogue
for realist portraiture taught
viewers to believe in the “integrity of the body” (Hunt), hence
in personal autonomy. Pre-
Enlightenment portraits depicted only members of the
aristocracy, and often as figures from
classical mythology, thus reinforcing the belief that this world
is but an allegorical expression of
another, higher order or being. But mid-18th-century galleries
were filled with portraits of
ordinary, middle-class people, not depicted in the garb and
scenery of myth, but in their own
clothing and homes, thus teaching viewers to see themselves and
their world as inherently
valuable. Taken together, Hunt contends, these artifactual
experiences created the emotional
framework in which the new discourse of human rights, with its
belief in the inalienable rights of
equality and personal autonomy, came to seem as if it had always
and obviously been true.
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If the popularity of the epistolary novel and realist
portraiture were responsible for the
evolution of the modern social order, then how are contemporary
cultural artifacts affecting who
we are becoming today? Consider Google Glass: the computer that
you wear like a pair of
glasses. Google Glass captures everything you see, hear, and
say, projecting your thoughts and
perceptions to the world, while also sending to you what
others are recording and allowing you
to gather still more information from the web. To wear Google
Glass, then, is to turn yourself
into a global transmitter and receiver of information. As
such, this technology is teaching users a
new way of being human: what I will call “iHumanism.” Whereas,
per Hunt, the Enlightenment
notion of “the human” understood selves to be fundamentally
individualistic and private,
iHumans see the self as fundamentally social, i.e., a
source and destination for shared
information, and mediating, i.e., a public broadcasting and
archiving service. On the one hand,
iHumanism may lead to positive, potentially revolutionary
changes in the social order, as
artifacts such as Google Glass teach us to see ourselves not as
isolated individuals but as nodes
in an open-ended, interconnected human web. On the other hand,
however, iHumanism threatens
equally revolutionary, but potentially very negative changes,
too, potentially trapping us in a
world where no experience is truly our own, and the twin “Big
Brothers” of government and the
market are always watching us.
