The physical body in Cyberspace: at the edge of extinction?
Introduction
So, is there anything "universal" which makes up "successful" communication situations, "successful" in terms of being efficient, enjoyable and "natural"? (With respect to artifacts "natural" means "acceptable", i.e. whether humans like to become engaged in interactions or not. Humans cannot avoid contact with other humans, but artifacts and new technology can, to some extent, be used or not). I assume that there is such a common basis underlying interaction, communication and "understanding". If we talk about interaction and communication in an entertainment or business context, agents have to understand each other. And all nature (and studies in natural sciences confirm this) tells us is that understanding cannot be separated from a "living body", an embodied mind. Understanding means re-experiencing and reconstructing past experiences on the basis of the current context and bodily state of an agent.
The question of embodiment has always been linked to the question "What is life and intelligence?" ... What do we know about how animals and humans use their body in real life? How do they live with their bodies within a given environment? In public, but also in the scientific community, "cyberspace" is often used as a metaphor for a world where the human body only plays a minor role, where we are in danger of becoming a creature without a body, experiencing things by direct stimulation of the nervous system, where we will lose the sense for reality and get lost as a virtual creature in a virtual world. A world where we become isolated, ending up as extremely individualized selfish beings. Some people in the artificial intelligence and virtual reality community are very enthuastic about this bodiless future; they are looking forward to "getting rid" of the ("imperfect", mortal) body, i.e. they like the idea of transmitting their personality and intelligence to a computer memory and leading an immortal and perfect life...
Body and Environment
Natural bodies are individual and unique. Even twins do not have a completely identical body. They might have a identical set of genes but their bodies are not identical. Bodies are physical entities. They occupy a distinct volume in space and time. No other individual can be at the same point in space and time. Our perception of reality uses the metaphor of a geometrical three- dimensional space within which our body is located. This is also a metaphor usually used in cyberspace that you locate interactions and people, or representations of people, in three-dimensional space. This is not just by accident or by a technological bias. This is because it due to a straightforward way of transferring metaphors of our natural thinking to metaphors of our thinking in artificial worlds. The body's shape changes during active movements or contacts with other objects. It is not something fixed. The body shows characteristic symmetrical and asymmetrical features. Individuals take a certain perspective according to the orientation of the body. Even if you are very close to another individual when, for example, you are watching a movie or dancing, it will never appear that you both experience things in exactly the same way, but simililarly. You can discuss the similarity of the experience and various forms of interpretation. You have to be aware, however, that you are always discussing ways of finding similarities. Language is our tool with which we communicate and find these common, similar aspects in our life and perception.
Reality and Active Bodies
The big advantage of having a physical body is that it gives you a first-person experience by actively exploring the world. This is why we often find it boring to watch TV or read a book. We can have very lively mental experiences by doing this. What is missing is a certain interaction, a direct feedback from the world. This is why virtual reality applications are sometimes much more appealing to children and also to adults, because they can provide this kind of feedback and interaction to some extent...
What matters are the ideas which are constructed in our embodied mind and which have an important meaning to us. A real person can have the same importance as a cartoon figure (e.g. to a child), or a football team (e.g. to adults). Technical devices which let humans enter virtual worlds manipulate the human body. They do not replace the body, they try to make virtual experiences (as we know them say, from watching TV) more realistic to us by allowing active exploration and interaction... Since actively exploring the world is a crucial aspect in (animal) intelligent behavior and learning, virtual environments could potentially bridge this gap.Conclusion - As Kerstin Dautenhahn sees it...
To conclude, in my view, we are not in danger that the physical human body will become extinct in cyberspace. It will be re-interpreted, somehow re-invented. Its meaning and expression will be adapted to changing conceptions of (social) "reality"...We do not have a database in our head but a story generator. We are constantly writing and re-writing scripts, stories about ourselves and other people. Cyberspace is a attractive medium because it gives us ways to enact and to replay these kinds of stories. It seems to be a universal human feature that we like stories, that we need stories in our life. My interest in cyberspace came from the idea that this technology may help us to write and to enact good stories, better stories than before. The body is the point of reference for the reconstruction of old "stories" and the reinvention of new ones.
Flying Through Walls and Virtual Drunkenness: Disembodiment in Cyberspace?
As virtual worlds develop on the Internet and become more integrated into people's daily lives, we need to examine issues concerning how people are represented, and how these representations through the electronic medium affect people's social relationships and own identities.
Mitch Kapor and John Barlow wrote: "The old concepts of property, expression, identity, movement and context, based as they are in physical manifestation, do not apply succinctly in a world where there can be none." Perhaps we need a new discipline in order to broaden our insight and understanding of our virtual selves. The traditional disciplines of anthropology, biology, psychology, sociology and philosophy can be supplemented by this new discipline. It is becoming known as cybertheory.
To what extent do we project our own bodies into a virtual world? Conventions and standards of bodies in the real world are too often carried over into virtual environments: the beauty myth is manifest in descriptions of bodies as sexy and beautiful; similarly, many examples of virtual characters represented as strong and powerful bodies also exist...Are we too deeply infused with the notions of beauty, power, and status that our virtual characters must also represent these conventional ideas? Does the fact that we see so many examples of real world conventions about the body transported into the virtual world mean that we are really disembodied? Are we not portraying bodies of our virtual characters as those that we wish our own bodies to resemble? How can we transcend the beauty myth in a virtual world and develop new ideas about the attractiveness of other individuals?
Although sensory information is different to our real world experience, technology is already providing us with new ways to explore movement in virtual environments. We can fly over landscapes, penetrate walls, enjoy multiple views simultaneously, move through all corners of Euclidean space, and step outside our portrayed representations, and back in again. Will these new experiences push our awareness of our body further into the background, will we feel completely disembodied, or will we be able to bring these bodily movement experiences back into our physical worlds to think anew about our own physical selves?
hello, and what are we today?
Identity is the first thing you create when you log on to a computer service. By defining yourself in some way, whether through a name, a personal profile, an icon or a mask, you also define your audience, space and territory. In the architecture of networks geography shifts as readily as time. Communities are defined by software and hardware access. Anatomy can be readily reconstituted. (Leeson 1996 : 325)
Seems surprisingly relevant to the current Facebook culture that my generation and many older and younger are currently intoxicated by......
As it can be seen from the quote above there is a certain creative element to 'being' in cyberspace. This notion of creativity is evident on the World Wide Web, where people can create a space to represent themselves such as a personal homepage. These pages often list personal interests, aspirations and ideals, sometimes containing pictures of the person it is there to represent but frequently they are text and simple graphics. The person who authors the page decides how much of themselves to reveal or even to invent a self that bears no relation (apart from authorship) to their 'real' selves. Thus, as Baudrillard put it, "this body, our body, often appears simply superfluous... ...everything is concentrated in the brain." [i] So at the same time as creating a persona the user is distanced from their actual body, but, as Balso points out "'freedom from a body' [does not] imply that people will exercise the 'freedom to be' any other kind of body than the one they already enjoy or desire."
What is quite a chilling thought to ponder as I read this article, is what does this culture mean for the future generations and for the future of the current Facebook generation?
The notion that the Internet is some kind of public forum, where ideas can be shared, and discussed by equals, behind a mask of anonymity is inherently flawed. The very fact that users are anonymous allows them to put forward opinions that do not have to be considered or informed. Any notions of democracy [x] on the net are similarly undermined, how would users vote without intrinsically fixing their identities? Without a fixed identity there is no safeguard against multiple voting. How can the disembodied and often dispersed, citizens of these virtual communities reach a consensus for non-virtual action? Poster contends that "Dissent on the Net does not lead to consensus: it creates the profusion of different views. Without an embodied copresence, the charisma and status of individuals have no force."
All these articles demonstrate that this issue is still very much current and split into different camps of whether the influence of cyber on modern day relations is a positive or negative one. From this we decided to not take a specific side but instead explore the sensations of what is removed from us in cyberspace, being the real and immediate senses, and team this was an observation on how we are currently using the internet and networking sites, in our example Facebook, in our every day lives. This would require:
- a blindfold
- a wheeley chair
- sensory experiences throughout the space
- a recording of a written script about how an individual uses Facebook
- some experimenting!
- a blindfold
- a wheeley chair
- sensory experiences throughout the space
- a recording of a written script about how an individual uses Facebook
- some experimenting!
Texts, Links & Images
- Dautenhahn, Kerstin, The physical body in Cyberspace: at the edge of extinction?, http://duplox.wzb.eu/docs/panel/kerstin.html
- Mark, Gloria, Flying Through Walls and Virtual Drunkenness: Disembodiment in Cyberspace?, http://duplox.wzb.eu/docs/panel/gloria.html
- Jones, Mike, hello, and what are we today?, http://www.garfnet.org.uk/new_mill/autumn97/sa.htm
- Fonteijn, Marc, Central Identity addons and readers, http://www.flickr.com/photos/marcfonteijn/1053975538/
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identical_Twins,_Roselle,_New_Jersey,_1967 