The Media and the Mediated
Think of an app. Any app.
Now think about its interface and where it touches your “real” life.
Between virtual worlds and everything“ in real life,” the boundary is becoming oblivious, and we can’t seem to escape it. Everything we face is in reality, virtual or not.
“However clumsy they may seem to us now, what’s important about such mediating artifacts is that each one implies an entire way of life — a densely interconnected ecosystem of commerce, practice and experience. ”
— Adam Greenfield, Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life — Smartphones
Aesthetics of tools that mediate our experiences with digital or virtual mediums also shape the way we treat digital technology. When the storefronts carrying digital devices are assigned a new function of “storytelling”, new aesthetics arise. We don’t just walk into an apple store; we walk into a museum where instead of artifacts of the past, the storefront displays items that convince us that they are of the future. Think of how an iPhone is framed by the pristine aesthetics of the Apple store, the monumental qualities these storefronts portray are no different from ways banks and museums were built to look like pantheons: to project the image of authority and higher power.
The Gap Between Our Realities
Rules seem to be different in the virtual world we take as an escape. We tend to think that the internet is another realm because what we see is all there is. As an example, gamers of first-person shooting games face minimal consequences pointing firearms at each other in the virtual world. The moral standards seem to be different because anyone can restart over and over again until a desirable outcome is achieved. We behave differently under pseudonyms and images of lives we upload to social media platforms. We believe it is not real. What we don’t see is that the internet is indeed physical, and embodies the same conditions we expect from “real life.” It is real life. The difference is that the digital is far more capable of accelerating certain aspects of our society to a higher velocity, based on what our society values.
Unbounded by the rules of the social milieu of our real reality, in a virtual world, there’re (seemingly) no real-life consequences. Everything is just algorithms — code. Hyper-realistic experiences of shooting guns in VR games are no longer new news to many of us. Do the increasingly realistic virtual experiences change the way we understand the consequences of our actions may cause in real life? Is the act of violence different when performed in games than in real life? How will the hyper-realistic experiences change the way we perceive realities. How will accessing such experiences change the way we understand the boundaries between the projected worlds and the “real” world? Is what we call “virtual reality”a place where we can practise and resolve our own complex emotions, motivations, and values or just a dark place where we lock these unresolved frictions all up and continue with our lives, pretending that we are all just fine.
Taking the Easy Way Out.
Amazon primes us for a future where shopping is frictionless. We no longer need to get out of the house and interface with a salesperson at a store, let along bargaining with a street vendor over a small change in how the vendor’s merchandises are valued. The touchpoints where we reconnect with our “needs” and “wants” disappear, and instead replaced by “you might also like” and “same-day shipping.” The frictionless experience can be upgraded to the push of a Dash Button registered to a household replenishable item or a simple command starting with “Alexa.” There is no space for consumers to pause and think about their purchasing decisions. We are primed to believe that interfaces and systems designed to reduce friction of completing a task are synonymous with efficiency. Thinking is mediated. Decision-making is mediated. Digital mediums create a space where the act of negotiating what we need and what we want with our inner voices is unnecessary and simply inefficient. Digital mediums create a space where the only action required from us is to respond to the “Call-to-Actions” one screen after another and eventually “convert.” People, or “users,” are diminished into numbers, nodes, relationships, data points, and streams of behavioural patterns to be fed into the next iteration of products mediating our relationships with our daily interactions and decisions.
Google’s thought experiment The Selfish Ledger is not far away from what we experience on a daily basis today. The constant streams of data we eThmit are logged through the devices we interact with. Thus constructing a rich ledger of our behaviours and transactions. In turn, the machine will prescribe us the best options we can choose from to reach our goals based on observations of the entire population it is observing.
“User-centered design principles have dominated the world of computing for many decades, but what if we looked at things a little differently? What if the ledger could be given a volition or purpose rather than simply acting as a historical reference? What if we focused on creating a richer ledger by introducing more sources of information? What if we thought of ourselves not as the owners of this information, but as custodians, transient carriers, or caretakers?”
(Excerpt from The Selfish Ledger)
Privacy concerns aside, the rather complex challenge for us is that humans as a whole are no longer required to go through the trouble of finding what our hearts desire anymore. Nobody was told to question why “they may also like” a certain product or certain kinds of content. The algorithms will instruct a user exactly the “conscious choices” to make to reach a personal goal while also benefit the greater community. The fear is no longer regarding how other people perceive us, but how the machines see us, judge us, and make decisions for us by comparing us with others who behave “like us.” The algorithms mediate our relationships with the world we inhabit already. The scariest of all is the denial of exerted values of the creators in the algorithms that we believe to be neutral. If we cannot even resolve our own emotions, motivations, and values, how can we instruct people other than us, and furthermore, create the algorithms to guide others (humans and otherwise)?
Then what?
As average people begin to exhibit fear and anger towards those who use technology to mediate our behaviours for goals that are not only ambiguous but also not reflective of a collective value, maybe we are also at fault for losing the sense of agency to dream, to create, and to take advantage of technology for what we consider essential.
Technology is a medium mediating our realities; we need to become mediators to negotiate with the realities which we exist.
Originally published on Medium for Speculative Futures Ottawa:
https://medium.com/yow-sf/future-media-and-mediation-of-experiences-c2298613c68a
