Book chapter: How the conventions of podcast culture open up spaces for non-linear interchange, ecological complexity and paradox, placing the podcast in a fertile relationship to cultural space.
Read moreGaming the Green Energy Revolution
As history progresses, human beings find themselves playing non-zero-sum games with more and more other human beings. Interdependence expands, and social complexity grows in scope and depth.
- Robert Wright, Nonzero (2001)
Read moreBBC Radio 4 Presents Invisible Belfast, the Radio Documentary
"We all like to get lost in a book - but when Danielle, an American visitor to Belfast, stumbles upon a mysterious handwritten note in a secondhand copy of Ciaran Carson's novel The Star Factory - she finds herself on a labyrinthine journey through his prose and through the hidden side-roads and alleyways of the city."
Read moreWhy social-digital matters for the green sector
What do renewable energy and social media have in common? A lot, says research. My research!
Read morewhat is posthumanism in the arts & pop culture?
Posthumanism is causing some interesting disruptions in the way we make, enjoy, think about, and classify art.
Read morewhat is posthumanism (now)?
Think posthumanism sounds horrible? Trust me, it doesn't mean what you think it does. Okay, maybe it does.
Read moreBeing Human with the Internet of Things
Image Credit: Keoni Cabral
John Searle explained distributed cognition with the metaphor of a man assembling “Chinese” in a closed room. Using a rulebook, the man assembles strings of Chinese characters into grammatical structures and pushes them out the door. It isn’t accurate to describe the man as understanding Chinese, Searle construes, but, rather, it is the entire room that knows Chinese.[i]
Many of us now live almost exclusively in the Chinese room. Every day, we participate in systems that cognize collectively, from apps that make use of our fitness, happiness or buying patterns to thermostats that learn our living habits. This is the Internet of Things or IoT: flows of data from objects and devices forms an information-rich, “smart” environment, indeed a system of interpenetrating environments, in which the feedback we currently associate mainly with “screen” devices increasingly arrives via many other avenues.
One result is a certain fluidity in how we interact with information and objects. We can't help be but challenged in our old idea of our human selves being separate from our environments; it's being replaced with a sense of cooperation with our environments, environments of which we are components, not masters. Not only does this blur the boundaries of the individual, it blurs the boundary between human and machine. The implications of this new way of living are interpreted by some as apocalyptic, by others as transcendent; the realities, as always, are likely to fall somewhere in between.
For my own part, I’m cautiously optimistic. I'm particularly curious to find out how the IoT will influence our understanding of, more than our technological or social-technological environments, the natural world. Will having to understand ourselves as part of larger mechanics in everyday ways help us to relate to natural systems in new ways? Or, to put it differently, will disrupting our sense of human mastery allow us to enter into more productive systemic relations with natural elements? I hope so.
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[i] Searle, J.R. “The Chinese Room Argument.” Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science (2001).