“We ask [ of the computer ] not just about where we stand in nature, but about where we stand in the world of artefact. We search for a link between who we are and what we have made, between who we are and what we might create, between who we are and what, through our intimacy with our own creations, we might become.”
― Sherry Turkle
Technology provides another level of interaction with the world around us and enables us to create tools or artefacts that provide greater insights into who we are. However, the losses and gains attached to the agenda of technology are profound. In attempting to express ourselves and learn more of our identity, our place in the network society and our connections to each other, we produce an interconnected world through technology that both connects us digitally and disconnects us physically. In this search for who we are and what we might create, this Sherry Turkle quote provides the great contradictions of intimacy with our own creations.
In order for us to connect to technology, and move through technology to a greater understanding of ourselves and our world environment, we connect emotionally to our digital world and digital reality. Thus the human-machine interface becomes more effective and affecting since it translates our reality into something that is both more and less tangible, and our identity and reality becomes a paradoxical relationship between the physical, ephemeral, digital and space of flows.
Technology then moves past the original concept of Techne, since it becomes its own autonomous force, moving past human rationality into machine rationality which is stripped of emotion, ruled by logical algorithms and is founded on the agenda of its creators. We in turn apply our emotional connection back to technology in an attempt to relate or attach ourselves to the creation, which in turn enables us to bypass the creative act associated with techne. Hence we arrive at the contradictory state of using technology to connect to others, our world and understanding, with the possibility of the removal of space, time and the physical.
Kenneth Buis
