30
I thank my psychotherapist colleagues for ongoing conversations on these matters. In particular I acknowledge the adolescent psychiatrist John Hamilton and the panels on “Adolescence in Cyberspace” on which we have collaborated at the Annual Meetings of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry in October 2004 and October 2008; the participants in the MIT working group, “Whither Psychoanalysis in Digital Culture” Initiative on Technology and Self, 2003-2004; and participants at the Washington Institute for Psychoanalysis’s “New Directions” Conference, April 30, 2010.
31
Maggie Jackson,
Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age
(New York: Prometheus, 2008)
.
33
Nicholas Carr,
The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
(New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2010). Here, the argument is that online activities—surfing, searching, jumping from e-mail to text—actually change the nature of the brain. The more time we spend online, the more we are incapable of quiet reverie, not because of habits of mind but because of a rewiring of our circuitry. This area of research is, happily, getting more and more public attention. See Matt Richtel, “Your Brain on Computers: Outdoor and Out of Reach, Studying the Brain,”
New York Times
, August 16, 2010,
www.nytimes.com/2010/08/16/technology/16brain.html
(accessed August 16, 2010).
34
Of course, one of my concerns is that the moment to summon ourselves to action might pass. We are at a point at which, when robots are proposed as companions for the elderly or as babysitters, we can still have a conversation that challenges these ideas. We still remember why they are problematic. I am concerned that in twenty years, one may simply boast, “I’m leaving my kid with the nanny bot.” After the cost of purchase, it will be free and reliable. It will contact you if there is any deviation from the plan you have left for your child—be these deviations in your child’s temperature or in a range of acceptable behaviors. I vividly remember leading an MIT seminar in 2001, one that was part of a celebration at the release of Steven Spielberg’s
A.I.: Artificial Intelligence
, when for the first time, I was the only person in a room of thirty who did not see any issue at all with the prospect of a computer psychotherapist. Moments when big steps with technology seem problematic have a way of passing.
EPILOGUE: THE LETTER
2
See Steve Mann (with Hal Niedzviecki),
Digital Destiny and Human Possibility in the Age of the Wearable Computer
(New York: Random House, 2001).
4
Bell and Gemmell, “A Digital Life.”
5
Thompson notes of his 2007 visit, “MyLifeBits records his telephone calls and archives every picture—up to 1,000 a day—snapped by his automatic ‘SenseCam,’ that device slung around his neck. He has even stowed his entire past: The massive stacks of documents from his 47-year computer career, first as a millionaire executive then as a government Internet bureaucrat, have been hoovered up and scanned in. The last time he counted, MyLifeBits had more than 101,000 emails, almost 15,000 Word and PDF documents, 99,000 Web pages, and 44,000 pictures.” See Clive Thompson, “A Head for Detail,”
Fast Company
, December 19, 2007,
www.fastcompany.com/magazine/110/head-for-detail.html
(accessed October 1, 2009).
6
Susan Sontag,
On Photography
(New York: Dell, 1978), 9.
7
Bell and Gemmell discuss the burdens of having a digital shadow. They anticipate that other people captured in one’s sights may need to be pixilated so as not to invade their privacy, data will have to be stored “offshore” to protect it from loss and/or illegal seizure, and there is danger posed by “identity thieves, gossipmongers, or an authoritarian state.” The fact that these three are grouped together as problems to be solved technically illustrates the power of the fantasy of total life capture. For after all, the potential damage from gossipmongers and an authoritarian state are not commensurate. They surely cannot be dealt with by the same technical maneuvers. Yet the fantasy is potent. Bell and Gemmell admit that despite all problems, “for us the excitement outweighs the fear.” See Bell and Gemmell, “A Digital Life.”
9
Thompson, “A Head for Detail.”
10
Thompson, “A Head for Detail.”
11
Obama himself fought hard and famously to keep his BlackBerry, arguing that he counts on this digital device to make sure that the “bubble” of his office does not separate him from the “real” world. Obama kept his BlackBerry, but in March 2009, the Vatican asked the Catholic bishops of Italy to request that their flocks give up texting, social-networking websites, and computer games for Lent, or at least on Fridays. Pope Benedict has warned Catholics not to “substitute virtual friendship” for real human relationships. On his YouTube site, the pope warned of “obsessive” use of mobile phones and computers, which “may isolate individuals from real social interaction while also disrupting the patterns of rest, silence, and reflection that are necessary for healthy human development.” The
London Times
reports that “even Pope Benedict . . . experienced the distractions of obsessive texting” when President Nicolas Sarkozy of France was flagged for rudeness when he checked his mobile device for text messages during a personal audience with the pontiff. See Richard Owen, “Thou Shalt Not Text until Easter, Italians Told,”
The Times
, March 3, 2009 (accessed July 30, 2010).
12
See Sherry Turkle, “Reading the
Inner History of Devices
,” in Sherry Turkle, ed.,
The Inner History of Devices
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008).
13
Technology and remembrance is a growing discipline. In addition to
Cyborg
, Steve Mann has written extensively about computation and remembrance. See, for example, “Wearable Computing: Toward Humanistic Intelligence,”
Intelligent Systems
16, no. 3 (May-June 2001): 10-15. From 1996 on, Thad Starner, who like Steve Mann was a member of the MIT cyborg group, worked on the Remembrance Agent, a tool that would sit on your computer desktop (or now, your mobile device) and not only record what you were doing but make suggestions about what you might be interested in looking at next. See Bradley J. Rhodes and Thad Starner, “Remembrance Agent: A Continuously Running Personal Information Retrieval System,”
Proceedings of the First International Conference on the Practical Application of Intelligent Agents and Multi Agent Technology
(PAAM ’96),487-495, 487-495,
www.bradleyrhodes.com/Papers/remembrance.html
(accessed December 14, 2009).
Albert Frigo’s “Storing, Indexing and Retrieving My Autobiography,” presented at the 2004 Workshop on Memory and the Sharing of Experience in Vienna, Austria, describes a device to take pictures of what comes into his hand. He comments on the implications: “The objects I photograph, while used, represent single specific activities that from a more general perspective can visualize how, throughout my life, my intentions, my desires, my sorrows have mutated. The objects become my emblems, the code through which the whole of me can be reconstructed, interpreted.” See Albert Frigo, “Storing, Indexing and Retrieving My Autobiography,” Nishida & Sumi Lab,
www.ii.ist.i.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~sumi/pervasive04/program/Frigo.pdf
(accessed November 2009). For a sense of the field’s current ambitions, see the Memories for Life project at
www.memoriesforlife.org
(accessed July 30, 2010) and the Reality Mining group at MIT and the Santa Fe Institute at
http://reality.media.mit.edu/about.php
(accessed December 14, 2009).
William C. Cheng, Leana Golubchik, and David G. Kay write about the politics of remembrance. They anticipate a future in which we will all wear self-monitoring and recording devices. They discuss the danger that state authority will presume that when behaving lawfully, people will be wearing the device. Not wearing the device will be taken as indicative of guilt. Yet, even given this dark scenario, they conclude with the claim that, essentially, the train has left the station: “We believe that systems like Total Recall will get built, they will have valuable uses, and they will radically change our notions of privacy. Even though there is reason to be skeptical that there will be any meaningful legal protection for the privacy status quo, we believe that useful technologies are largely inevitable, that they often bring social changes with them, and that we will inevitably both suffer and benefit from their consequences.” See William C. Cheng, Leana Golubchik, and David G. Kay, “Total Recall: Are Privacy Changes Inevitable?” (paper presented at Capture, Archiving, and Retrieval of Personal Experiences [CARPE] workshop, New York, October 15, 2004),
http://bourbon.usc.edu/iml/recall/papers/carpe2k4-pub.pdf
(accessed December 14, 2009).
15
Wilkinson, “Remember This?”
INDEX
Abandonment, children’s fears of
Abuse, of digital “creatures,”
Adams, Henry
Addiction, as metaphor for “holding power” of technology
Adolescents
as aficionados of profile writing
identity play as work of
Internet “persistences” (of data, of people) and
and moratorium
need for connection, disconnection
need to have a buffer between self and world
and new sensibility
separation, developmental task of
and stillness, need for
Affective computing
AI.
See
Artificial intelligence
A.I.: Artificial Intelligence
(film
)
AIBO
aggression toward
categorizing gives way to everyday routines
care by, fantasies of
creature and machine, views of it as
caring for
companion, role as
“feelings” attributed to
“growing up,” appearance of
playing with
projection and
teaching it, experience of
Alcott, Louisa May
Aldiss, Brian
“Alive enough,” as milestone for digital creatures
Aliveness, children’s theories of
Alterity, robots and
Alzheimer’s disease, and robotic companions
America Online
Anger, as way of relating to robots
Anthropomorphism, robots and
Anxiety,
online life, as provoking
“of always,”
privacy and
Apologies
confessions and