IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - December 2016 - 44
opinion
Rebecca Ricks
W
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2016.2618730
Date of publication: 12 December 2016
44
Mediating the Body
Wearable Tech
and Disembodied Reality
CREDIT: U.S. GOVERNMENT
here does wearable
technology exist?
T h e qu e s t i o n i s
more complex than
it might first appear,
when one considers the thin corpus
of metaphors that are available to
us to describe the Internet and
technology. Do wearables exist
somewhere between the physical
and the virtual worlds? When you
use them, are they like a pencil or
are they like your body? In terms of
regulation, are they like an iPhone,
a house, or a limb? Can they be
compared to prosthetics? What kind
of conceptual domain are we working with?
The metaphors we use matter
because metaphors carry weight.
"Metaphors are encumbered with
assumptions," says a recent Atlantic article, "and when people use
metaphors, they embed those
assumptions in the discussion. These
assumptions are the residue of the
physical analogues from which
the metaphors draw." One of the
most widely accepted metaphors
for describing the virtual reality of
the online world is the concept of
cyberspace, described in William
Gibson's 1984 sci-fi novel Neuromancer [4] this way: "Lines of light
ranged in the nonspace of the mind,
clusters and constellations of data.
Like city lights, receding." Cyberspace exists outside of the realm of
the real, according to Gibson. It is
a "nonspace" that simultaneously
possesses spatial contours and
yet doesn't.
Gibson's description of cyberspace neatly halves the digital and
the physical worlds, a concept referred to as "digital dualism." We
should exercise caution in our
embrace of the digital dualism emIEEE Technology and Society Magazine
bodied in the term "cyberspace,"
argues David Meyer [9]. Cyberspace
"denotes a place but, if anything,
it's about the elimination of spatial
concerns as we socialize, collaborate and work together across the
world." When we allow ourselves
to split the world into two halves -
the digital and the real - we fail to
acknowledge all the ways in which
those two worlds are simultaneously constructing and co-constructing
one another.
∕
DECEmber 2016
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