It is impossible to tire of acknowledging applications from which
many will people benefit, but which many resent even before
these applications become available. They all become possible
once they transcend the pragmatic framework of the civilization
of literacy because they are based on structurally different
means of expression, communication, and signification. We have
all witnessed some of these applications: sensors connected to
unharmed nervous terminals allow the quadriplegic to move. A
child in a wheelchair who exercises in virtual reality can be
helped to function independently in the world that qualifies his
condition as a handicap. Important skills can be acquired by
interpolating patterns of behavior developed in the physical
world in the rough draft of the simulated world. People are
helped to recover after accidents and illness, and are supported
in acquiring skills in an environment where the individual sets
the goals. In Japan, virtual reality helps people prepare for
earthquakes and tests their ability to cope with the demand for
fast response. Interconnected virtual worlds support human
interactions in the space of their scientific, poetic, or
artistic interest, or combinations thereof, stimulating the
hope, as naive as it may sound, for a new Renaissance.
Not everything need be virtual. Active badges T transmit data
pertinent to an individual's identification in his or her world.
Not only is it easier to locate a person, but the memory of
human interaction, in the form of digital traces, allows people
and machines to remember. You step into a room, and your
presence is automatically acknowledged. The computer lets you
know how many messages are waiting for you, and from whom. It
evaluates how far you are from the monitor and displays the
information so you can see it from that distance. It reminds you
of things you want to do at a certain time. Details relevant to
our continuous self-constitution through extremely complex
practical experiences play an important role in making such
interactions more efficient. A personal diary of actions,
dialogues, and thinking out loud can be automatically recorded.
Storing data from the active badge and from images captured
during a certain activity is less obtrusive than having someone
keep track of us. This is a new form of personal diary,
protected, to the extent desired, from intrusion or misuse.
This diary collects routine happenings that might seem
irrelevant-patterns of movement, dialogue, eating, reading,
drawing, building models, and analyzing data. The record can be
completed by documenting patterns of behavior of emotional or
cognitive significance, such as fishing, mountain climbing,
wasting time, or dancing- according to one's wish. At the end of
the day, or whenever requested, this diary of our living can be
e-mailed to the writer. One can review the events of a day or
search for a certain moment, for those details that make one's
time meaningful.
In the world beyond literacy and literacy-based practical
experiences, we can search for artistic events. A play by
Shakespeare can be projected onto the screen of our eyes, where
the boundary between reality and fiction starts. The play will
feature the actors of one's choosing. The viewer can even
intercalate any person in the cast, even himself or herself, and
deliver a character's lines. Sports events and games can be
viewed in the same way. In another vein, we can initiate
dialogues with the persons we care for, or get involved in the
community we choose to belong to. Belonging, in this new sense,
means going beyond the powerless viewing of political events that
seem as alien as almost all the mass-media performances they are
fed with. Belonging itself is redefined, becoming a matter of
choice, not accident. Belonging goes beyond watching the news
and political events on TV, beyond the impotence we feel with
respect to the huge political machine. All these can happen as a
private, very intense experience, or as interaction with others,
physically present or not. To see the world differently can
lead to taking another person's, or creature's, viewpoint. How
does a recent immigrant, or a visitor from abroad, perceive the
people of the country he has landed in? What do human beings
look like to a whale, a bee, an ant, a shark? We can enter the
bodies of the handicapped to find out how a blind person
negotiates the merciless world of speeding cars and people in a
hurry. The empathy game has been played with words and theatrics
in many schools. But once a person assumes the handicapped body
in a simulated universe, the insight gained is no longer based
on how convincing a description is, but on the limits of
self-constitution as handicapped. People can learn more about
each other by sharing their conditions and limitations. And,
hopefully, they will ascertain a sense of solidarity beyond
empty expressions of sympathy.
That all these semiotic means-expression in very complex dynamic
sign systems-change the nature of individual practical
experiences and of social life cannot be emphasized enough.
Everything we conceive of can be viewed, criticized, felt,
sensed, experienced, and evaluated before it is actually
produced. The active badge can be attached to a simulated
person- an avatar-let loose to walk through the plans for a new
building, or on the paths of an expedition through mountains. The
diary of space discovery is at least as important as the
personal diary of a person working in a real factory, research
facility, or at home. Before another tree is cut, before another
riverbed is moved, before a new housing development is
constructed, before a new trail is opened, people can find out
what changes of immediate and long-term impact might result.
It is possible to go even a step beyond the integrated world of
digital processing and to entrust extremely complicated
processes to neural networks trained to perform functions of
command, control, and evaluation. Unexpected situations can be
turned into learning experiences. Where individuals sometimes
fail-for instance under emotional stress-neural networks can
easily perform as well as humans do, without the risks
associated with the unpredictability of human behavior. The
active badge can be connected, through a local area network of
wall-mounted sensors that collect information, to a neural
network-based procedure designed to process the many bits and
pieces of knowledge that are most of the time wasted. People
could learn about their own creativity and about cognitive
processes associated with it. They can derive knowledge from the
immense amount of their aborted thoughts and actions. Ubiquity
and unobtrusiveness qualify such means for the field of medical
care, for the support of child development, and for the growing
elderly population. With the advent of optical computers, and
even biological data processing devices, chances will increase
for a complete restructuring of our relation to data,
information processing, and interhuman relationships.
Individuals will ascertain their characteristics more and more,
thus increasing their role in the socio-political network of
human interaction.
Some people still decide for others on certain matters: How
should children play? How should they study? What are acceptable
rules of behavior in family and society? How should we care for
the elderly? When is medical intervention justified? Where does
life end and biological survival become meaningless? These people
exercise power within the set of inherited values that
originated in a pragmatic context of hierarchy associated with
literacy. This does not need to be so, especially in view of the
many complexities hidden in questions like the ones posed above.
Our relation to life and death, to universality, permanence,
non-hierarchical forms of life and work, to religion and
science, and last but not least to all the people who make up our
world of experiences, is bound to change. Once individuality is
redefined as a locus of interaction through rich sign systems,
not just as an identity to be explained away in the generality
that gnoseologically replaces the individual, politics itself
will be redefined.