Physical-Sensory Control in CTheory and The Economist
This week has seen the arrival of a new banjo, and the realization that I'm behind in some other tasks, but nonetheless, I did notice that a new article on CTheory has more than a little to do with a The Economist's latest Technology Quarterly.
The former, "The Coils of a Serpent: Haptic Space and Control Societies," by William Bogard covers the physical-sensory elements of control stemming from Deleuze's "Postscript to Societies of Control." Though the term "haptic space" has always seemed largely unnecessary and more obfuscating than clarifying, Bogard produces a good piece that applies his through read of the Postscript in some interesting ways.
The Technology Quarterly articles - specifically "The ultimate game gear" and "The trouble with computers" - also deal with ideas of physical-sensory control of the technology user. In the first article of the two, the writer describes complex chairs and media systems designed to manipulate a video-gamer's body in various ways. These new devices are all designed to sever the gamer's connection to non-game experiences just as much as they are to sever connection to experiences that are a bit too game like (such as the nasty aftermath of a drag race gone wrong). This suddenly echoes Bogards phrasing in "Coils":
"Borges's haptic world in which 'everything touches everything' becomes an engineering project to produce digital environments that have exactly the 'right feel' and can command the body directly."The designers of the video game accoutrements have as their central purpose to create this "right feel" - which may or may not reflect reality.
The second article in the Technology Quarterly that deals with physical-sensory control asks what innovations could make computers easier to use, much as the mouse did once. On the surface, this might seem like a question of a user's "control" over an interface. In fact - and this is essentially what eny discussion of interface is about - it is a question of interface designers of how to control the user. The article focuses, in part, on gesture-based graphical interaction with computers, but really the logical end for interface designers is a product which reads the mind of the user and displays when s/he wants without command. This is essentially the downfall of a physical-sensory control in favor of the more data-driven control that Deleuze writes about in the Postscript. No longer would technology users be required to touch or simulate touch (as a mouse "pointer" does), but the system would know best what to display and not to display.
All in all, these are three interesting pieces to read together, though they wouldn't seem immediately applicable to each other.
Comments
So I was talking to a human-computer interaction student this afternoon, and he brought up two of Heidegger's ideas that seem relevant to the two articles from the Economist: thrownness for the first, and readiness-at-hand for the second.
As far as I understand it (which is probably not far), thrownness is a constant feature of consciousness, not just something we experience at moments of distraction or disorientation. Or to put it another way, there's always some level of distraction and disorientation - we always have something else on our minds. So a game that succeeded in being completely absorbing would, paradoxically, be completely unlike real life.
I also wonder whether suspension of disbelief, and the effort of maintaining it in the presence of distractions, isn't a major part of the game-playing experience. Isn't that what makes arcades so much fun?
The other concept was readiness-at-hand - my friend the student says it crops up a lot in HCI through ideas such as affordances. But the reason I mention it here is because of your suggestion that a mind-reading interface would be preferable to an interface based on explicit manipulation. To me, readiness-at-hand suggests the opposite: we are (for good evolutionary reasons, if you like explanations of that kind) predisposed to think of the world in terms of what we can do with it, and we think such thoughts with the motor cortex. When we think about manipulating things, we imagine using our hands, in both readings of that phrase: we imagine the use of our hands, and we use our hands to imagine. We don't imagine dragging things around with mental tractor beams, so an interface that pretends to be a mental tractor beam will be harder to "get to grips with" than an interface that pretends to be a physical object.
Thanks for the pointer to the Bogard article, by the way. I'll be interested to see what he has to say about Postscript to the Societies of Control, which didn't strike me as one of Deleuze's most original works. IMHO ;-)
Posted by: Michael Rogers | September 19, 2007 01:16 PM