Thoughts on becoming (or being) technological1 Lucas D. Introna Lancaster University

Abstract

In this short chapter I will discuss our relationship with technology more generally, and information technology more specifically. I will suggest that our relationship is more intimate than what we might want to acknowledge. I will suggest that our technology makes us as much as we make it. We and our technology are intertwined to such a degree that we can (never could) separate the technical from the social. I will suggest that we have always been cyborgs. I will also suggest that it is fundamental for managers to understand this if they are to appreciate the implication of technology for organising.

Becoming or being cyborgs A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism… (Donna Harraway)

The human body has its limits. When it comes to nails the hands are just not good enough, we need a hammer. With the hammer in our hand we can extend the human body, and importantly, the range of actions that the body is capable of. The development of human capacity to act (to do things) is directly linked to the development of our tools. However, as our tools dramatically extend our domain of action they do not leave us unchanged. We tend to think of our tools as passive things just lying there for us to take up as and when we need them (or not). This is a rather simplistic view of our relationship with our tools. This view of tools does not appreciate the complexity and subtlety of our technologically mediated existence.

As we take up the hammer the hammer and we are transformed quite fundamentally. The hammer is not ‗a hammer‘ if it is not in my hand – hammering requires a hand or rather a body as well as a target, something requiring hammering. In my hand the hammer becomes a possibility to exert a force, to knock down a brick wall for example. Furthermore, with the hammer in my hand 1

Published as: Introna, L.D. (2007) Thoughts on becoming (or being) technological. In Huizing, A. and E. de Vries (eds) Information Management – Setting the Scene, Elsevier, Amsterdam, pp. 129-134. [ISBN:978-0080463261]

the brick wall becomes, for me holding the hammer, soft and penetrable rather than impenetrable. I now embody the possibility of knocking down a wall. I am a person that can go through brick walls; but more than that, a whole range of actions previously impossible suddenly seems possible. In this simple example we see that the hammer transformed me and I it. But we have moved too quickly.

There was something more fundamental that we have not talked about. Even recognising the object lying on the table as ‗a hammer‘ presumes familiarity with practices of hammering. If we can imagine a world where the practices of using large weights to increase the force that one can exert is not present at all then one can ask: why would one even take the object lying on the table as ‗a hammer‘? Maybe the example of a hammer is a bit too difficult to imagine since hammering is such a pervasive and intuitive action (we might as why?). Imagine rather a pen in a culture where the practice of writing does not exist. Why would the person encountering a pen take it to be a ‗pen‘? Thus, we take up tools as relevant ‗tools‘ within a range of cultural practices that already reveal it as such or such a possibility to act. But even more than this: I do not supply take up tools for its own sake. Rather, I take up tools to do something as part of being somebody in particular. As a consultant I take up a mobile phone as a ‗mobile phone‘ to contact my clients, or be contactable for my clients, because that is what it means to be a consultant. In taking up the tools within the cultural practices as part of being somebody we not only transform the tools and ourselves we also transform (enact) the cultural practices that render possible (and meaningful) the world (of management consulting for example) where we are what we are (as consultants) and our tools are what they are (as mobile phones). As we and our tools interpenetrate each other we become each other‘s possibility to be what we are. Is it possible to be a consultant without my mobile phone in a world of global mobile communication systems?

What has happened here in our discussion? We have shifted from a view where we saw tools as simple extension of our capabilities to a view where we and our tools constitute each other‘s possibility to be the who or what that we are. We have become (or rather have always been) cyborgs. Our tools are now the conditions for being the sort of entities we have become (as consultants and managers, etc). Our CCTV cameras augment our eyes. PDAs help us remember. Mobile phones enable us to communicate wherever we are. As we delegate actions to technology to extend our being we are becoming more and more cyborgian—human/machine hybrids—by the day. Our looking is now also a non-human looking, as is our memory, our communication, and so forth. Indeed one can question whether we can be who we are, as politicians, business people, teachers, writers, policemen, etc. without our extended machine capability. Our way of being, our very existence, have become entangled with a technological world in which it has

become difficult to say where we end and where our machines begin. The technical has become (always been) social and the social has become (always been) technical. If this is the case, as I hope I have shown through some simple examples, then this has profound consequences for us. Technical decisions are also social decisions. Choosing our technologies is simultaneously choosing the sort of humans (or organisations) we want to be or become. Let us explore this theme some more and try to discern what it might mean for us.

Consciousness, awareness and forgetting in the digital world There is a fine line that divides consciousness and awareness. We might think that one implies the other or that there might be supervenience between consciousness and awareness. The problem of the consciousness is also related to another problem, that of the unconscious. There is a whole dimension of ourselves that is impossible to perceive directly even though we may be able to become aware of it through a cultural historical perspective, as reflected in our art, our writing and our ways of doing. And maybe this is good? Is full awareness really what we want or need? Do we really want to be aware of everything? We might want to argue that that everybody would be better of, that it would be better for our society, if we were all always fully aware. But have we considered what it might mean for us? As our lives are increasingly being ‗recorded‘ in the digital world we are more and more confronted with our digital selves, and hence with our past. Celebrities find pictures of themselves on the web in situations they thought they had left behind and would want to forget—instead they remain in the perpetual ‗now‘ of our collective digital awareness. Through this digital awareness our lives are also becoming increasingly transparent and available to others, and even to ourselves. We get categorised and sent mail because our buying habits are being recorded and analysed. One could say that we are forever recorded in the awareness of the digital mind when we are online. Our activities are increasing visible through logs, websites, blogs, etc. Digital cameras and digital video capture us and these digital images may start to circulate in the digital awareness in ways that we no longer control. Our past may return to our present whether we want it or not. We may no longer control our memory. As our lives become increasingly mediated by the virtual digital world a mountain of ‗aware material‘ is building up. As this happens, forgetting, being no longer aware of this or that matter or event, becomes more and more difficult to do.

Forgetting is important to our human way of being. It is an essential part of our survival that we can forget bad experiences and not stay crippled by them. We all make mistakes that we

need to forget if we are to ‗move on.‘ In the digital world forgetting is becoming more and more difficult to do. Our collective digital awareness no longer allows things to simply slip away into our unconscious being. Our mind, individually and collectively, is increasingly a publicly available digital mind that remembers what we might want to, or need to, forget. As we become increasingly digitally mediated we may loose our possibility to forget. What sort of humans (or organisations) will we be or become? Do we want such a future?

Two kinds of memory and two kinds of times Our nervous system is a mobile memory so is our PDA. However, there is an important difference between our memory and that of the PDA. The best way to understand this is with regard to time. For the PDA time is a linear stream of events, with specific beginnings and specific ends. It is a matter of quantity. Time, to be machine time, must be quantified (when will the meeting be and how long will it take?). The PDA‘s time—machine time—is also chronological; it ends when it breaks. For the machine there is no connection between an hour ago and later on today except in the terms of chronology. Our human temporality is very different. Our ‗here and now‘ is full of the past and already full of the future. We find ourselves in the ‗now‘ already with some level of awareness of where we have just been and already with some expectation of where we are heading. Our past, present and future blends into each other in such a way that we cannot say where the one ends and the other begins—it is not linear or chronological. Our time is different because we conceive it as a quality; it is our feeling of being or non-being in our situation. Our memory has times and moments all mixed together. Our memory is an improbable collection of images; it does not simply record our activities, it lets us grow.

But what happens if our lives are becoming increasingly defined by machine memory and machine time? When people make appointments with us in our digital diary, enter our memory, without our mediation (as happens in groupware systems)? What happens when we are being conceived of as available (or not) in machine time but we actually live our busy lives in human memory and human time? Will machine time and memory transform our human time and human memory? What if we become so imbedded in machines that human time and human memory slips away?

Virtuality and Community As our lives become digitized it enters the domain of the virtual. Virtuality allows for mimesis. With mimesis we can mime—‗as if‘ it was happening. Once you appear in the database, as a record, I can ask you questions; query you (virtually) without your involvement. I can change

your status by simply updating your record, without your involvement. I can interact with you, get to know you, without you involvement. Many people know me through my website and my virtual wondering in the digital space called the internet. I have two lives (maybe more)—an embodied situated life and a digital virtual life. Sometimes these ‗parallel‘ lives support and confirm each other sometimes they disturb and contradict each other. As we become increasingly virtual (a virtual community and a virtual society) we need to reflect on what it means. Clearly it is not helpful to suggest that the virtual is ‗superficial and trivial‘ and the situated embodied copresence (often referred to as the ‗real‘) is ‗thick and significant.‘ For some their virtual lives are very significant because they share significant concerns (an illness) with their virtual partners; for others it may just be a form of escape, like a messenger chat with a stranger. Nevertheless, as we embrace the digital world we cannot avoid becoming virtualised.

But what is the relationship between the actual and the virtual. I cannot kill you but I can delete you from the database—or can I? As our life possibilities become enmeshed in the virtual world how should we treat these virtual strangers? Can we talk about them as mere representations when people‘s identity becomes intimately tied to their virtual lives? When my ‗I‘ becomes co-constituted through the virtual, the virtual becomes like the actual, equally real. We are becoming virtual/actual hybrids. As technology becomes our constitutive condition we need to rethink many of our categories—self/other, real/virtual, human/machine, and so forth. We can no longer treat the machine as the alien. The alien and we are now one.

The technological mood and the post-human way of being Martin Heidegger, the philosopher, famously claimed that ―the essence of technology is nothing technological.‖ Technology is not merely an artifact or our relationship with this or that artifact; rather, the artifact—and our relationship with it—is already an outcome of a particular ‗technological‘ way of seeing and conducting ourselves in and towards the world. We live in the age of the technological mood. In this technological mood problems show up as immediately requiring technical solutions. This technological mood frames the way we see, and make sense of the world. As the already technologically oriented human beings that we have become, we will tend to conceive of communication as a problem requiring a technological solution, hence the proliferation of communication devises. Of course we now communicate more (through our email, mobile phones, blackberry‘s , etc) but what is the nature of this communication? Technologically mediated communication reframes what communication is. Is communication becoming equivalent to being able to make a connection? Furthermore, once in place technology allows the world to ‗show up‘ in particular ways. You are a different person to me with a mobile

phone than without one. With a mobile phone you become revealed, or show up, as ‗contactable‘, ‗within reach‘ as it were. As we incorporate our technical devises in our everyday world we become more and more immersed in our technologic mood. It seems more and more obvious that this is the way the world is and should be. As technology reframes the way we understand our activities and ourselves we become increasingly framed and set-up as technological beings. Indeed we could say that technology has become the a priori horizon of meaning that conditions the way the world shows up for us. Can we escape this technological mood? Do we want to? Have we not already become (or have always been) post-human?

Cyborgs and (cyborg)organisation Organisation is increasingly tied to information technology. We can organise globally because technology has extended our reach. We can fragment our organisation in as many parts as we need and locate them wherever we need because we can always tie them together through global systems of transportation and communication. However, if my speculations above are correct we are not just building a more efficient system of production and consumption, we are also simultaneously building a different society—a different way of being human. Who is deciding our future? As we embrace technology, do we know what we are becoming? If human values and culture is the ‗glue‘ that makes organisations work, what will happen to organisations as these values become displaced (or transformed) into human/machine values and culture? Maybe there are longer term implications to our technologically mediated organisations which we have yet to grasp? But even more mundane: if we implement a new ERP system we are not just making things for efficient or effective; we are changing the way of being in the organisation; we are choosing a very different type of organisation—not just technically but also socially in a very fundamental way. Do we understand this intimate connection? I would suggest mostly not.