People, Personas, and Politics 34 – Information and Behaviour
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): People, Personas, and Politics
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/04/22
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Other forms of misinformation and information overload cracking the egg of normal human behavior.
Rick Rosner: Human behavior is going to—we have been, throughout our history, acting according to biological imperatives in increasingly fancy and technology-filled environments. We live in technologically mediated dwellings. Dwellings are a form of technology. Apes living in trees or sleeping in caves don’t have dwelling technology. Once you start stacking up Palm Fronds and stick and skins, you are starting to have building technology.
The food we eat comes from technology. Clothing—language is a form of communication technology. Everything we do is a form of technology. It is mostly in the form of technology. It is mostly in the service of biological imperatives – continuing to live, to not die, to reproduce, to evaluate each other and the environment according to how they may help or hurt our changes to survive and reproduce.
We’re still completely biological. Even though, we are surrounded by our technology. The entirely biological era of humanity will be coming to, not an end but—well, the era of non-purely biological humanity has begun. One of the major mediators of this change is information. The way we are now with regard to social media and how we exchange information is radically different from the way people exchanged information just 10 years ago.
The amount of information that’s exchanged is radically different than eras ago. We are going to augment our information processing abilities. We have started, but it will begin to be more intimate. We will be more linked into non-biological information processing. So that eventually we will be integrated into large information processing systems. You can argue that we already are via the endless and constant flow of information that we have put ourselves into.
But that’s more of an app—it’s not physically connected to us for the most part. I have my fitness bracelet. A lot of people wear Fit Bits, but that’s fancy jewelry. 1% of the population dos have a computer built into him or herself. Pacemaker, cochlear implants, insulin pumps, but even that is not that intimate. Pacemakers aren’t really influencing—you haven’t changed your thinking. You made your heart beat regularly. That in-built intimacy will eventually take the form of information processing augmentation, and what becomes acceptable in terms of—we couldn’t handle Google Glass, but 50 years in the future. There will be acceptable ways to have wearable either built-on or ride-on or built-in computing devices.
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