I’ve always considered the desire for immediacy to be an essential part of the human experience, particularly when it comes to spirituality. There has always existed an urgency in the human for transcendence beyond the physical, for a direct connection with something greater, whether it be a group of people or God.
Evidence of that desire is everywhere. Unless we shut ourselves away from the world and from our very selves, our actions and interactions all have some element of direct connection.
As we are further propelled into the new millennium, it seems that not only the desire, but the demand for immediacy is more present a concept than ever. Objects once used as vehicles for immediacy are themselves considered barriers to connection. Through digital technology, we see not only the disappearance of those objects, but the significance and sacredness of those objects as well. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin remark on this phenomenon in their book, Remediation. The authors posit that media functions as “a network of artifacts, images, and cultural agreements about what these special images [i.e. photographs] mean and do” (58). They further explain that “When a tourist is taking a photograph or making a video…we treat the line of sight between the camera and the object as a real obstruction: we walk around it, bend under it, or wait until it is gone. We make these gestures…to acknowledge the reality of the act of mediation” (59).
Remediation in digital technology has changed the way we consider ownership of space and media, but also, it is increasingly reducing the space between gestures that are informed by our experience with objects and what those gestures are meant to accomplish. A striking example of this is Pranav Mistry‘s Sixth Sense device, which was showcased on TED.
Mistry’s device, while exciting, raises the question of privacy and ownership in digital media. The explosion of digital technology occurred and continues to occur at such a tremendous rate that the rules for usage lag behind. While archaic objects like the camera are loaded with implications for a specific set of etiquette, the gestures themselves have no such value.
Thanks for sharing Mistry’s video and for raising the point about privacy and ownership in digital media in a world where the lines between the physical world and digital world are blurred increasingly every day. This alludes to why copyright law is becoming insanely complicated as we move forward. For example, if you take a photograph of a work of art and post it online, who owns the rights to that image? What Mistry is doing is much more intriguing and complex than that.
The (un)popularity of Windows 8 is interesting because Microsoft, which has been under fire for not being forward with design, pushed forward with a gesture-based desktop and users wanted something more familiar. In this case, what was meant to be a more seamless and immersive experience was rejected (although that rejection may just be a blip in the road–as you saw in the Virtual Revolution, Facebook’s Newsfeed was universally rejected on the day it came out). Sometimes users get attached to their hypermediated experience (such as we are used to sitting behind our computers screens with a keyboard, rather than gesturing and speaking to our computers) and taking that away suddenly seems “unnatural.”
You raise a good point. I think that technology itself has engendered its own “gestures”; the ways in which we operate technology have, over the years, become intuitive. Once these are replaced with more “natural” movements, it feels “unnatural.” Windows 8 is an excellent example. It’s been making me crazy since I’ve had it installed on my computer.
Here’s a link to the Sixth Sense Technology website.
http://www.pranavmistry.com/projects/sixthsense/
Awesome. I especially like that Mistry is giving away instructions on how to build a prototype.