Cyborgs, Second Brains, and Techno-Lobotomies: Metablog #2

Last week, I had the pleasure of being Freshly Pressed on WordPress.com – that is, I was a featured blog on their home page. As a result, I got more traffic and more interesting comments from people in one day than I have since I began blogging. Thanks, WordPress editors!

I’ve been really excited and inspired by the exchanges I’ve had with others, including the ideas and themes we all started circling around. Most of the dialogue was about a post I made on technology, memory, and creativity. Here, I was interested in the idea that the more we remember the more creative we may be simply because we have a greater amount of “material” to work with. If this is the case, what does it mean that, for many of us, we are using extremely efficient and fast technologies to “outsource” our memory for all sorts of things? – from trivia, schedules, and dates, to important facts and things we want to learn. What does this mean in terms of our potential for creativity and learning, if anything? What are the pros and cons?

I was fascinated by the themes –maybe memes? – that emerged in my dialogue with other bloggers (or blog readers). I want to think through two of them here. I am TOTALLY sure that I wouldn’t have developed and thought through these issues to the same degree – that is, my creativity would have been reduced – without these digital exchanges. Thanks, All.

Picture taken from a blog post by Carolyn Keen on Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto

Are We Becoming Cyborgs? The consensus is that – according to most definitions – we already are. A cyborg (short for cybernetic organism) is a being that enhances its own abilities via technology. In fiction, cyborgs are portrayed as a synthesis of organic and synthetic parts. But this organic-synthetic integration is not necessary to meet the criteria for a cyborg. Anyone who uses technology to do something we humans already do, but in an enhanced way is a cyborg. If you can’t function as well once your devices are gone (like if you leave your smart phone at home), then you’re probably a cyborg.

A lot of people are interested in this concept. On an interesting blog called Cyborgology they write: “Today, the reality is that both the digital and the material constantly augment one another to create a social landscape ripe for new ideas. As Cyborgologists, we consider both the promise and the perils of living in constant contact with technology.”

Yet, on the whole, comments on my post last week were not made in this spirit of excitement and promise – rather, there was concern and worry that by augmenting our abilities via technology, we will become dependent because we will “use it or lose it.” That is, if we stop using our brain to do certain things, these abilities will atrophy (along with our brain?). I think that’s the unspoken (and spoken) hypothesis and feeling.

Indeed, when talking about the possibility of being a cyborg, the word scary was used by several people. I myself, almost automatically, have visions of borgs and daleks (look it up non sci-fi geeks ;-)) and devices for data streaming implanted in our brains. Those of us partial to future dystopias might be picturing eXistenZ – a Cronenberg film about a world in which we’re all “jacked in” to virtual worlds via our brain stem. The Wikipedia entry describes it best: “organic virtual reality game consoles known as “game pods” have replaced electronic ones. The pods are attached to “bio-ports”, outlets inserted at players’ spines, through umbilical cords.” Ok, yuck.

There was an article  last month on memory and the notion of the cyborg (thank you for bringing it to my attention, Wendy Edsall-Kerwin). Here, not only is the notion of technological augmentation brought up, but the notion of the crowdsourced self is discussed. This is, I believe, integral to the notion of being a cyborg in this particular moment in history. There is a great quote in the article, from Joseph Tranquillo, discussing the ways in which social networking sites allow others to contribute to the construction of a sense of self: “This is the crowd-sourced self. As the viewer changes, so does the collective construction of ‘you.’”

This suggests that, not only are we augmenting ourselves all the time via technology, but we are defining ourselves in powerful ways through the massively social nature of online life. This must have costs and benefits that we are beginning to grasp only dimly.

I don’t have a problem with being a cyborg. I love it in many ways (as long as I don’t get a bio-port inserted into my spine). But I also think that whether a technological augmentation is analog or digital, we need to PAY ATTENTION and not just ease into our new social landscape like a warm bath, like technophiles in love with the next cool thing. We need to think about what being a cyborg means, for good and for bad. We need to make sure we are using technology as a tool, and not being a tool of the next gadget and ad campaign.

The Second Brain. This got a lot of play in our dialogue on the blog. This is the obvious one we think about when we think about memory and technology – we’re using technological devices as a second brain in which to store memories to which we don’t want to devote our mental resources.

But this is far from a straightforward idea. For example, how do we sift through what is helpful for us to remember and what is helpful for us to outsource to storage devices? Is it just the trivia that should be outsourced? Should important things be outsourced if I don’t need to know them often? Say for example, I’m teaching a class and I find it hard to remember names. To actually remember these names, I have to make a real effort and use mnemonic devices. I’m probably worse at this now than I was 10 years ago because of the increased frequency with which I DON’T remember things in my brain now. So, given the effort it will take, and the fact that names can just be kept in a database, should I even BOTHER to remember my students’ names? Is it impersonal not to do so? Although these are relatively simple questions, they raise, for me, ethical issues about what being a professor means, what relating to students means, and how connected I am to them via my memory for something as simple as a name. Even this prosaic example illustrates how memory is far from morally neutral.

Another question raised was whether these changes could affect our evolution. Thomaslongmire.wordpress.com asked:  “If technology is changing the way that we think and store information, what do you think the potential could be? How could our minds and our memories work after the next evolutionary jump?”

I’ll take an idea from andylogan.wordpress.com as a starting point – he alluded to future training in which we learn how to allocate our memory, prioritize maybe. So, perhaps in the future, we’ll just become extremely efficient and focused “rememberers.” Perhaps we will also start to use our memory mainly for those types of things that can’t be easily encoded in digital format – things like emotionally-evocative memories. Facts are easy to outsource to digital devices, but the full, rich human experience is very difficult to encode in anything other than our marvelous human brains. So if we focus on these types of memories, maybe they will become incredibly sophisticated and important to us – even more so than now. Perhaps we’ll make a practice of remembering those special human moments with extreme detail and mindfulness, and we’ll become very, very good at it. Or, on the other hand, perhaps we would hire “Johnny Mnemonics” to do the remembering for us.

But a fundamental question here is whether there is something unique about this particular technological revolution. How is it different, say, than the advent of human writing over 5,000 years ago? The time-scale we’re talking about is not even a blink in evolutionary time. Have we even seen the evolutionary implications of the shift from an oral to a written memory culture?  I believe there is something unique about the nature of how we interact with technology – it is multi-modal, attention grabbing, and biologically rewarding (yes, it is!) in a way that writing just isn’t. But we have to push ourselves to articulate these differences, and seek to understand them, and not succumb to a doom and gloom forecast. A recent series of posts on the dailydoug  does a beautiful job of this.

Certainly, many can’t see a downside and instead emphasize the fantastic opportunities that a second brain affords us; or at least make the point, as robertsweetman.wordpress.com does, that “The internet/electronic memory ship is already sailing.”

So, where does that leave us? Ty Maxey wonders if all this is just leading to a technolobotomy – provocative term! –  but I wonder if instead we have an amazing opportunity to take these technological advances as a testing ground for us to figure out as a society what we value about those capacities that, for many of us, are what we think make us uniquely human.

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