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On Media Conjectural and Things to Come. Roman Onufrijchuk. February, 2005

PUBLIC DRAFT: VERSION 2.2

On Media Conjectural and Things to Come.

Roman Onufrijchuk

I: Them

1.

It appears we are well on our way to an age of lively stuff; our material culture for

over two centuries or so -- has gone from the mere inanimate to automated1, and

soon perhaps to something verging animate. This "lively stuff" is something new.

Aspects of it, unique emergent media, may come to have a profound effect on the

character of our lives or those of our descendants. What are we to make of it? How

are we to understand, in advance, what sorts of questions such a technology will

raise, how it will enable which modalities of relatedness and interrelatedness, how

will it predispose us to think of, act upon and with things? How could it shape our

experience and understanding of others? How might this emergent media form

nuance our behaviors as moral actors? Would these "newnew media condition our

orientations to what and who matter in our lives? While what follows is woven in the

spirit of conjecture a conclusion based on indicators rather than hard facts -- that

of which it sets out to inquire is not. While our tone is provisional, the issues are

quietly pressing. What well be calling the animates are very possibly around thecorner; questions later than sooner may prove to be purely conjectural in face of fact

put paid.

Animates? One is tempted to say "robots" and be done -- for a very significant

aspect of the "new" new media will involve robotics, and in no small measure. Were

it not for the apparently continuous trend toward wireless systematic integration,

which Blue space implies and enables, robots would suffice. Rather, this new "new

medium" (or media, for the parameters cannot yet be known) will be characterized

by environmental intelligence, post graphic user interfaces (GUI), and technologies

that possess varying degrees of autonomy, personality, affect- and environment-

sensitive interactivity, ability to learn and bond with their owners, andsome of

1 For a concise history see: Witold Rybczynski, Taming the Tiger: The Struggle to Control Technology(NewYork: Viking Press, 1983).

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them will be free-standing ambulatory dexterous informatic artefacts -- robots2.

Whereas robots, children of the 60s, have worked shop floors for nearly two

generations, the animates will move into our homes, offices, airports, clinics and

hospitals as well as other institutional settings. For some an enabling hopeful vision,for others further colonization of daily life by mechanism, surveillance and tacit

compliance to a logic not one's own: But the next generation, or speciation, of our

media and material culture is surely moving in this direction. How do we who study

media, and who take responsibility for the future by the practice of teaching, prepare

ourselves, our intellectual tools and the future, for what such new media might

imply? How to systematically query that which has not yet appeared? Are we at

risk, that this should be an exigence?

We are up against something subtler than risk, a force or emergent body of issues

suppler and more diffuse. In the popular imagination it is exactlyrisk that is figured.

3-ways people safe appropriating and citing Asimovs rules of robotics

proclaims an ad for the machines in I Robot3. While the images of technology run

amok and turning on its makers is compelling and dramatic enough, the analogy

would be to argue that the real effects of the automobile on North American societies

can be equated by the number of people killed in car crashes. Its a factor, and very

real, but hardly the onlyeffect of the automobile on daily life. To complicate

matters, the emergence of this lively stuff is likely to proceed as it has relatively

gradually and more by a capillary means than an overnight invasion. Not the

arrival of the TV, one day there was radio and the next, there were pictures talking

and things showing too. The evolution of the animates will be more of a bonding,

cross-fertilization and hybridization, ultimately a confluence of many separate

technologies, some annealing quickly and some over time. Rather than the animates

arriving one morning, it is far more likely that well wake up one morning, find one

of them making the coffee, and think nothing of it.

In advance of this potential arrival, this effective but quiet coalescence, and because

the constituents are still under constructionandbeing prototyped, well-grounded

2 Francisco Goldman,A Robot for the Masses (New York Times Magazine, 2004 [cited 15 December2004]); available fromhttp://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/28/magazine/28ROBO.html?ex=1104814800&en=ccb85bd8a6015d4f&ei=5070&oref=login.3 Alex Proyas, "I Robot," (USA: 20the Century Fox, 2004).

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beyond anything possessed by either before.

There are no animates yet, though the stuff does get livelier daily. The term

"smart," rather than lively, is normally used to designate artefacts with computer

chips in them. In the present we hear about, and can even buy, prototypes of semi-satisfactory smart cars and smart ovens, houses and dust, windows and paint,

fabrics and flooring, toilets and toys. This quiet, gradual but unrelenting expansion

of artefactual "smartness," combined with changes in markets, technologies,

materials, power supply, states of knowledge & "know how," and public attitudes is

leading us to the lively new media that may yet come to characterize this century.

The "smart" is actually programmed, essentially "instinctive," and mostly inert. But

the conjectural "lively" stuff to come will probably move as well as do, and make,

"act" in addition to being an actant, transact, perhaps transbody and/or transfigure

who we are.

2.

The recent United Nations Economic Council for Europe report on the state of things

robotic tells us that orders for domestic, companion, and intimate robotic

technologies surpassed those for industrial robots in 2003-4. The reports authors

further projected that the current global population of robots of 2.1 million will have

reached over 10 million by the end of the century's first decade6. The largest part of

that population is expected to be in settings other than the factory. To keep matters

firmly in perspective, however, its worth noting that the discourse about robots

soon assisting in the care for the elderly and infirm is over 30 years old, and no

such robotic help has made it to general application7. The robot helper, however, is

an "insistent technology" that has taken many forms in the dreams and imaginative

products of our species: folklore, fable, myth, painting, theatre (where the word

"robot" was born), film, literature, and nightmare8. Based on that evidence alone,

one could surmise that the robotic servant is as inevitable as was heavier-than-air

flight. They may never look like the characters "David" nor "Teddy" in Spielbergs

6 United Nations Economic Commission for Europe UNECE, World Robotics 2004 [PDF] (United Nations,October 20 2004 [cited December 15 2004]); available fromhttp://www.unece.org/press/pr2004/04robots_index.htm.7 It should be noted too, however, that the I Robotcompany now has a robotic unit that dispensesmedications in a number of Americas leading hospitals.8 Frank Zingrone, "Laws of Media: The Pentad and Technical Syncretism," McLuhan Studies: explorationsin culture and communication 1, no. 1 (1991).

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AI9 (Mother: "He's a smart toy, and Teddy, in a voice rich in cognac and cigars,

"I'm NO toy!"), though I wouldn't rule out Teddy.

Thinking of something related if not exactly the same, cognitive psychologist and

influential user-oriented design Donald Norman advocate, conjectured animatesbefore there was a World Wide Web and e-mail was still only for the technologically

initiated10. He imagined what we are calling the animates exactly as a Teddy.

Because these technologies would accompany us from cradle to grave, and because

theyd be our playmates and teachers in childhood, Norman conjectured, theyd

come to be known as Teddys. Theyd change in form, he suggested, as we grew

in experience, sophistication of interest and responsibility, but would possess within

them a record of our entire lives, and so with a neotic pathos, theyd remain

Teddys for life. Thus a core, some internal guts, would remain continuous

whilst the form and thing itself changed. Teddies would be small enough not to be a

bother, intelligent and resourceful, a kind of PDA on steroids, and become

companions intimates.

A rueful tone pervades Normans conjecturing of 1992: He noted although we

wanted only the benefits and none of the problems of such a technology:

Alas technology is always a double-edged sword, always showing two faces tothe world. Every benefit has its accompanying drawback. I have mixed

feelings about this Teddy. I can imagine the good things. I can fear the bad.But actually I have little choice in the matter. It is coming into being11.

The actual physical manifestation of Normans animate is bit more slippery than the

friendly name Teddy implies. We feel a tension between a Teddy Bear and

something like formless and not unlike Alessandro Mendinis nebulous informatic

object acting yet defying physical definition. This thing would be subjects to

accretions and peripherals, to sheathing by producer, re-sheathing in decals or

custom surfaces by the user, up-grades, and -- by its inner workings and

performativities -- telling user and designer nothing about what its form and function

might be12. A few years deeper into thezeitgeistinforming Mendini, in neighbouring

France Jean-Francois Lyotard curated an exhibition at the Centre Pompidou meant to

9 Steven Spielberg, "A.I. Artificial Intelligence," (USA: Dream Works Home Entertainment, 2001).10 Donald A. Norman, Turn Signals Are the Facial Expressions of Automobiles (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1992).11 Ibid.12 Maurizio Morgantini, "Man Confronted by the Third Technological Revolution," in Design Discourse:History/Theory/Criticism, ed. Victor Margolin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).

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challenge the usual ontological assumptions about the distinction between people

and things. The Immaterials exhibit and installations were to do this by

demonstrating the animate-like qualities of electronic communication technologies,

particularly nascent IT13. This sensibility shared with the observations of previous

decades leading to the discourse about the fragmentation of needs and wants asdeterminate states and a concomitant dematerialization of objects14.

In an interesting re-materialization, this nebulous informatic object, appeared as

an emotional machine and ultimately a robot over a decade later when Norman

returned to the topic again. Working through his project describing the emotional or

aesthetic imperative in design and experience, Norman arrived at the question of

emotional machines a theme that had been appearing in his less publicized work

through the intervening years15. Just as in 1992, he again posed a series of ethical

questions that such technologies could represent interwoven with his argument for

why such technologies are inevitable. In 2004 Norman wrote:

It is not too early to think about the future difficulties that intelligent andemotional machines may give rise to. There are numerous practical, moral,legal and ethical issues to think about. Most are still far in the future but there

is a good reason to start now -- so when problems arise, we will be ready16

.

The theme echoes from 1992 where -- having first meditated on the apparent

inevitability of the Teddy -- Norman reflected, and posed the guiding this excursus:

And if human beings are not sufficiently intelligent about its design,

functionality and use, it will forever alter our lives in ways we do not want17

.

But is it to be problems, fears, and ways we do not want, only? And, given life's

short and Commander Data and the Borg are long way up the future's tooth, why

inquire? Why not leave it to the artists and speculative fabulists to spin the

13 Jean Francois Lyotard, "Les Immateriaux (the Immaterials),"Art & Text17, no. April (1985).14

See Ann Ferebee,A History of Design from the Victorian Era to the Present: A Survey of Modern Style inArchitecture, Interior Design, Graphic Design, and Photography(New York: Van Nostrand, 1970), WilliamLeiss, The Limits to Satisfaction: An Essay on the Problem of Needs and Commodities (Toronto:University of Toronto Press, 1976), William Leiss, Stephen Kline, and Sut Jhally, Social Communication in

Advertising: Persons, Products and Images of Well-Being, trans. 2 (Scarborough: Nelson, 1990), TiborScitovsky, The Joyless Economy: An Inquiry into Human Satisfaction and Consumer Dissatisfaction(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976). The theme also plays a central role in Stuart Ewen,AllConsuming Images: The Politics of Style in Contemporary Culture (New York: Basic Books, 1988)..15 Norman had worked as a consultant to a California robotics firm developing a personal robot. Donald A.Norman, Emotional Design: Why We Love or Hate Everyday Things (Cambridge: Basic, 2004)..16 Ibid.17 Norman, Turn Signals Are the Facial Expressions of Automobiles.

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possibilities and put our trust in some social osmosis leading us to discernment? Is

there anything inherently wrong with a gradual adaptation to colonization by

convenience, personablitiy and personalization, service and intelligence, security and

their technological vehicles? This, of course, depends on who's looking. Surely, here

are opportunities and imperatives. Regardless of whos looking, however, theindicators suggest the animates will appear throughout out world and affect us or our

descendents. Thus, how to gauge the animates potential impact, assess the trade-

offs and costs involved in their dissemination and uses, and prepare ourselves for the

things to come?

3.

What kind of medium be these animates? Anima, a word with a long history, is

Latin for soul, the Greek equivalent being psyche. Henrik Lorenz suggests that

our basic ideas about the soul had taken shape by the time of Socrates death18

(469-399 BCE) when the soul was commonly thought as spoken as having four

main defining aspects: First the psyche or anima was thought the distinguishing

quality of living things. Second, the soul was something subject to emotional states.

Capability at planning and pragmatic action was another characteristic of the soul.

And the anima was a bearer of virtues such as courage or justice, or vices and

weaknesses. We pause: With these ancient and still resonant requirements in mind,

can we put a soul in a machine? Can a toaster be said to be alive (or ever be said

to be alive)? Would you want to get around in an emotional automobile: Imagine

thatmobile staging ground for road rage! Planning, on the other hand, along with

calculating, sorting, we gladly hive off to the machines. And there is a base from

which to argue that any artefact, in so far as it fits within a cultural matrix, can be

said to possess virtues or express flaws in its makers and therefore its own

character. But a soul?

Putting a soul in a car or toothbrush is very unlikely since were hard pressed todemonstrate the existence of a soul scientifically in the first place (and perhaps

18 Hendrik Lorenz,Ancient Theories of Soul(Winter 2003 Edition) (The Stanford Encyclopedia ofPhilosophy, 2003 [cited January 21 2005]); available fromhttp://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2003/entries/ancient-soul. Further elaboration can be obtainedfrom E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951). Jaynesprovides a systematic discussion of the Homeric figurations that would combine into the idea that wouldthen be influential in other major doctrinal formations: Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in theBreakdown of the Bicameral Mind. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976).

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consciousness, for that matter). That said, once youve met ELIZA and applied a

dash of imagination, however, its not hard to project that human communication

mimetics -- corporal, vocal, gestural, emotive can easily feel like conversation with

an actual person (albeit in typed form and not for all that long). ELIZA, a interactive

application available on the Net, is primitive by anyones standard butstill on theweb, and still regularly and plentifully visited19. Interestingly, she anticipates the

immediate and virtually text messaging enabled by SMS and related protocols today.

ELIZA adumbrates where interaction with our smart new media might be taking us

perhaps a generation from now: new modalities of mediation by our things, with

others, and certainly within ourselves. If we easily, readily, sometimes eagerly, and

virtually always at some expense, suspend disbelief to immerse into narrative on TV,

at the theatre, or into interactivity of a game, why not while interacting with an

apparently sentient, emotionally receptive and lively, personable and responsive,

content rich, amicable mechanical or informatic thing?

To say that we make something animate usually means to enable something to

move as if it were alive, this is how the term is used in creating cartoons and

anime. The more an entity appears to move of its own volition, the more we

suspect it is alive20. The greater the degree of autonomy, unique quirkiness, a

defect here and a there, and the thing becomes even more lifelike 21. Thus, by

animated we mean things loaded with technologies that enable them to mimic and

reduplicate biological, psychological and, quite literally, anthropomorphic

communication processes. Invariably these will be sophisticated enough

technologies to appear simple, transparent in their functioning, but present to us in

ways no technology or animal has ever been before.

We can conjecture an ecology or system of technologies enabled to varying degrees

with capability for rich human interaction, information transaction, and transmission.

Continuous improvements in capturing and simulating what Neal Stephenson called

the vapour of expression,

22

advances culminating in natural spoken languageinterface, and wireless technologies, broadband, Internet integrating with the

19 http://www.manifestation.com/neurotoys/eliza.php3 and also Joseph Weizenbaum, Eliza--a ComputerProgram for the Study of Natural Language Communication between Man and Machine (Volume 9 Number1) (Communications of the ACM, (): 36-35., 1966 [cited February 11 2005]); available fromhttp://i5.nyu.edu/~mm64/x52.9265/january1966.html.

21 Paul Bloom, Descartes' Baby: How the Science of Child Development Explains What Makes Us Human(New York: Basic Books, 2004).22 Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash, Bantam paperback ed. (New York: Bantam Books, 1993).

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increasing power, sophistication and dropping costs of components and materials,

could produce a companion technology not unlike Normans Teddy but with

additional features. We may assume animates will possess all the features of smart

phones that are currently the fastest speciating and spreading personal technology

in terms of their development, diversification and almost global diffusion.

Like todays smart phones, animates will connect, receive, store and retrieve as well

as send data in voice, text, graphic and image. They will also record and retrieve

audio and video smart phones already do all these things. Smart phones, poised

to perhaps overwhelm the PDA, offer bundles of communication platforms and

formats, variations on all the functions provided by the current personal digital

assistants. Thus we expect animates to come equipped with the smarts to

schedule our lives, do the reminders. Theres more, however: drawing on

databases of precedent messages (I already have a default outgoing message

system of about ten archived Please call . . . , Meeting cancelled . . . , Call me .

. . that came with my nothing-special mobile handset), animates might infer and

draft potential answers from received and pre-screened messages. Better yet, they

might be deputized to deal with nuisance e-mails from the less-than-happily-

tolerated; a kind of vietz or feint in which the nuisance thinks theyre

communicating with you when in fact its Teddy23. The ad copy pitching the

upgraded capability is equally imaginable Is it you, or Teddy? Theyll never know

for sure!

Animates will be wireless. Like smart phones theyll be equipped with Bluetooth

protocols enabling users to communicate with and operate other devices and

appliances through them. This capability has just begun to emerge into our midst.

Bluetooth technologies, enabling machines to work together on wireless command

from anywhere in the coverage area, are the another of the first real steps toward

the sort of distributed, effective and affective personal communication ecology the

animates will be developed in part to realize and serve. We are modeling these newnew media on what already exists or is soon within reach; lets push a little further

into the conjectural.

4.

23 Unless, of course, your Teddy is speaking to their Teddy. That too?

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So what will it be, this animate? Would it be a breadbox on wheels, a manikin, a

hairy homunculus, avuncular machine-work gnome, sympathetic plushy toy, or

perhaps only a nebulous informatic object? The figuration thus far the emotional

machine or robot articulated in Normans Teddy, Dicks/Scotts androids/replicants,

and Kubricks/Spielbergs mechas embody the unresolved tensions around whatmay actually be the shape of things to come, or not as the case may be. Many

technologists would agree that a human-like robot is unlikely24, what is more to be

expected is a distributed computing and robotics many specialized smaller devices

working together25. While the Swiss army knife be-all, end-all device is not likely,

this not to say that something in the order of an application or program that runs

everything else is to be ruled out.

If anything, this arrangement of some central command core and a gang or mob

of connected devices and peripherals as well as avatars of one sort or another is

likely to be the case. The core would be conceptually closest to what Norman

describes in the 1992 article, something a learning, emotionally receptive,

remembering and retelling entity that can migrate from one Teddy-shell to

another. Norman suggests that Teddies could take the shape of piece of jewelry or

intimate object, clothing -- and we might add --a car, a skateboard, belt buckle,

piece of furniture, a bio-integrated implant, an appliance. Why not an ambulatory

pint-sized work of art26?

We could conjecture a typology of the animates: A controlling core, something like a

presence, mind, or intelligence and its avatars, manifestations and extensions.

The core, or perhaps CPU might reside where one does, not unlike the PC

24 One shouldnt be too sure. If recent developments in Japan stand the test of application, a roboticreceptionist (multilingual and with a sense of irony, no less) may be just around the corner. MediaAdvanced and Kokoro Co., Actroid: Reception Robot[Web site] (Advanced Media & Kokoro Co., 2005[cited April 6 2005]); available from http://www.nedo.go.jp/english/expo2005/robot-01.html, For a moreindependent vuew: Barb Dybwad,Actroid Robot Greets Japan World Expo Visitors a Bit Too Naturally[Blog] (Engadget, 2005 [cited 2005]); available fromhttp://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000627035261/, and Shihio Tomioka,Actroids' in the Limelight:

Robots at Aichi Expo out to Show and Test Future Roles (The Asahi Shimbun, 2005 [cited 6 April 2005]);available from http://www.asahi.com/english/Herald-asahi/TKY200504020152.html.25 Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Perseus Publishing,2002). Also Eric Bergman and Donald A. Norman, "Making Technology Invisible: A Conversation with DonNorman," in Information Appliances and Beyond : Interaction Design for Consumer Products, ed. EricBergman (San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 2000). and Economist, "Monitor," The Economist,September 16 2004.26 In this regard, the Scots writer Iain M. Banks, in his fictional civilization called simply the Cultureoffers some of the most imaginative and vivid depictions of what an animate ecology might consist of.See: Iain M Banks, Consider Phlebas (London: Orbit, 1992), Iain M Banks, Excession (London: Orbit,1999), Iain M Banks, Look to Windward(London: Orbit, 2000), Iain M Banks, Player of Games (London:Orbit, 1992), Iain M Banks, Use of Weapons (London: Orbit, 1992).

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today. Additionally, if we extrapolate on the indicators, we may imagine such a core

unit being manifest throughout an environment as a presence, or in an ambulatory

or easily portable form, something of a familiar. Further, the CPU would also be

the modulating and controlling node of an intimate and personal animate

environment. We can imagine this CPU as the interface with various other purpose-built devices and appliances of varying intelligence. Such elementals or

processors in various other objects, appliances, and service bots would be designed

to enable and reflect their purposes -- vacuuming, mowing lawns, clearing clogs in

the plumbing and drainage, serving as supports and walkers, and so on. There

might also be avatars. Not only might the CPU present itself in an ambulatory or

easily portable avatar, but animate technologies would make avatars available to

users as well. Such avatars, themselves Teddy in mobile form, like those used as

proxies in virtual worlds, may migrate to remote sensing and communicational

applications. In these circumstances they might play roles as familiars when one

travels (portable family and friends for company), or if prefers not to go to a

business meeting in a far off place (renting an animate proxy like a car and sending

it in ones stead).

A personal animate communication ecology could be very much enabling and

empowering, and therefore in no small part inviting. Thus, the animates will perhaps

be driven by consumer demand? Such is one of drivers in the UNECE report cited

above. It is also clear that consumer considerations are neither the only ones, nor

the only set of forces driving R&D. Armed animates have significant military

applications andimplications. On the killing fields, animates would be more

intelligent hunters than the robots currently being deployed. Like them, theyd

potentially feel no fear, no hunger, or discomfort, nor conscience (if it was

programmed out) when going about their grim assigned tasks. Automated security

systems, beginning to take their places in our world, are one thing, but what would

animate security systems imply? To be sure, an institutional or military animate

ecology with the prospect of deployment of force can be chilling, and -- depending onwhos animate it is -- outright terrifying. Paranoid dreams and claustrophobic

fantasies feed well off the prospects. But thats just it and a key component of

Normans question unless we have some way to systematicallyconjecture this new

medium we are left with hit and miss, insight, hyperbole, unfounded fears,

unachievable goals and unexpected consequences coming at us from out of the

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unnoticed, unintended, and unforeseen.

5.

We might argue the impact of animates on daily life can be deduced from the

imperatives driving their emergence. Commercial, business, market, military, andcorporate imperatives would loom large, but by no means fill the horizon. As Pacey

has demonstrated, more imperatives are at work in technological innovation than

often meet the eye27. In addition to the imperatives listed, we could add

technological imperatives, as well as the existential pleasures of overcoming

insurmountable problems (can we get this thing to climb stairs?) and master

elemental forces (how can we power this thing indefinitely?). There are imperatives

that appear from the user sphere demographics, lifestyles, play imperatives, health

and therapeutic as well as security imperatives. The list goes on because this

technology will not be born in a bicycle shop, as was the Kitty Hawk or an ego-driven

lab in East Orange, New Jersey, as was the electric light bulb. The animates are

coalescing out of diverse labours of hundreds of researchers in universities, labs, and

research installations around the world.

Could we understand them by analogy drawn from historical experiences an

archeology of sorts? Some progress has been made in this area, but not enough to

fully guide us28. Nor can we understand them grasp them by analogy to a social

archeology that points to slaves, servants and attendants, workers or companions of

various sorts as models. For no slave, no servant, would ever have ever been

endowed by capacities such as animates, especially in their mediational and

aggregate forms. Their archeology is far more complex and points also in the

directions of the histories of psychology, magic, religion, myth and folklore;

contemporary genres such science and speculative fiction; the histories of toys in

general, Teddy Bears, marionettes, action figures and dolls, collectible figurines in

particular. What is more, since the animates as media will be, above all else,

relational conditioners, we might explore their emergence and subsequent effects onpolitical and personal economies of the communication by extrapolating from the

arrival of the alphabet, the printing press or in Internet?

27 Arnold Pacey, The Culture of Technology(Oxford: Blackwell, 1983).28 Gaby Wood, Living Dolls: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life (London: Faber and Faber,2002).

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In a recent text on the dos and donts of communication and cultural research,

Deacon et al, after admonishing us that there is no such field as communication but

rather a social phenomenon that many different kinds of social scientists study,

recommend that we approach issues of communication from one or a combination of

three basic approaches29

. Neither history, nor any of its practitioners are included,presumably because this meant to be a practical guide to media and cultural

analysis. Nor is there any note of comparative approaches30, again perhaps

pragmatics of application does not seem apparent to the authors. The three selected

research grounds positivist, interpretive/hermeneutic and critical realist all have

merits and take apart communication questions in useful ways. But all cases, the

methods Deacon recommends could be applied to the hype that accompanies the

proto-animate technologies or the economic and interest group imperatives driving

their development. If we are to address Normans question, or at least anticipate

the scope it requires of us, we will need to remain both in the realm of conjecture as

well as scanning wider spectra of human relational phenomena.

6.

In advance of exploring relational phenomena, might we not turn to the things

themselves, at least insofar as they might be to hand. We could simulate the

simulacrum and engage it. We might probe how the animate performs as a tool a

mere means to an end. Here productivity, might be the virtue. Would we need an

emotional machine to get productivity more productive? Life, however, is not

always about productivity, and more to the point, the animates, are expected to

proliferate exactly outsidethe domain of productivity into intimate spheres. So

perhaps animate as toy would provide a better set of clues weve alluded to

historical aspects of this above. But here too, while covering a large dimension of

life, play like productivity does not constitute a core to the scope of relational

phenomena that make up a whole human life.

Animate as totem or talisman might serve better in the case of the former the

29David Deacon, Researching Communications: A Practical Guide to Methods in Media and Cultural Analysis (London: \Oxford University Press, 1999).30 The comparative approach to media analysis grounded in a nexus incorporating Innis and Grant aswell as McLuhan -- developed by Angus and still to be noted in the communication research fields, exhibitsrich methodological and especially substantive implications for the assessment of emergent media. For anapplication see Ian H. Angus,A Border Within: National Identity, Cultural Plurality, and Wilderness (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1997), Ian H. Angus, Primal Scenes of Communication :Communication, Consumerism, and Social Movements, Suny Series in the Philosophy of the SocialSciences. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000).

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animate serving as connection to forms of association and identity, in the latter used

as a device to enhance the power and security of the user. Here too we have useful

figures for consideration but not sufficient to answer or address Normans question.

Given the rich content animates will either contain or access (the stuff of glittering

moments and precious memories), and with their wide range of functionality,perhaps we can explore their significance through the figure of treasure? Again,

this will be a dimension of what they could become for us, but not all. Because, as

Norman suggests, animates will provide instruction, might they be figured as a sort

of socializing template, or tutor guiding us through the book-learning phases of

our educations, and then acting as advisors for the rest of our lives?

Perhaps, plagued by many suppliers and poor quality control, noninteroperabilities,

and bogus or flawed upgrades, animates might become a kind of torment in the

daily sphere. All of these options are suggestive and confluent, some fertile, but

they refer to inanimate material objects, mainly consumer durables. The indicators

suggest that the animates will probably take a much more active part in our lives

than a mobile phone, piece of personal ornamentation, hammer, personal

conveyance device, or furniture. To achieve the posture toward the animates and

lively stuff embedding and enabling them, that is, as Norman admonishes,

intelligent about their functionality, use and design, we will have to approach the

animates with a larger protocol of questions, and one that is more about us than

what things are.

II. US

1.

2.

The indicators driving our conjecture suggest the animates may, within a generation

or two or sooner, but then increasingly, become interactants

31

in intimate, private,public domains of experience as well as many places and institutional settings of

daily life32. More of us may well find ourselves collaborating with animates at our

31 J Johnson and (Bruno Latour), "Mixing Humans and Non-Humans Together: The Sociology of a Door-Closer," in Ecologies of Knowledge, ed. S.L. (ed.) Star (State University of New York Press, 1995).32 Ulf Hannerz, Exploring the City: Inquiries toward an Urban Anthropology(New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 1980), Daniel Miller, Material Culture and Mass Consumption, Social Archaeology.

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places of work and occupation (where they may ultimately displace most, if not all,

of us from jobs). We will engage with them in the ways we provision and equip our

needs and lives, projects and desires. We can imagine them taking places in the

retail and services sectors. We can be fairly certain that proto-animates will soon

increasingly become aspects of our modes and means of mobility. Animates maysoon become fellow travelers of a sort; GSM, OnStar, and locational signals

emitted by all mobile phones prefigure this. Well also encounter animates as parts

of the relational settings and contexts for what we do and where we go when were

out. That theyll become part of the domestic realm is equally certain at this point

and will be one of the key entry points both into our lives and places of greatest

cultivation of our relationship with, and through, the animates. We can also safely

conjecture that animates will have roles to play in the neighbourhoods, communities

localized and imaginary33 -- that matrix our abiding, co-interrelatings and

meanings.

We might think of these five provisional categories as settings, or borrowing from

Mauss, as constituting relational forms similar in structure, dynamics and functions

as the habitus. Marcel Mauss (1872-1950) proposed the term habitus to describe

the cultivated and formative environment made up of things, people and practices

that structure a bawling bundle of raw connation and appetency, solipsistic will and

desire, into a social and cultural being a human34. Specifically the term referred

to the childhood home, the formative domestic cultural and social ecology in which

one learned the rules of social propriety. Just as the habitus is a set of people,

practices and things, so each of the other four here listed, are living aggregates of

things and others, procedures and proprieties. We live in, ever-passing through and

between, these settings.

Thus these settings dwelling, occupational, communal, market, and mobile might

provide constituents for a primary protocol within which, and by means of which, to

conjecture the presence of intelligent and emotional machines. We may, by way ofconjecture then ask, how might the animates, or indeed, one species or variety of

animate, condition our comings and goings, expenditures and efforts, attention and

(Oxford, OX, UK ; New York, NY, USA: B. Blackwell, 1987), Edward Tenner, Our Own Devices: The Pastand Future of Body Technology(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003).33 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism(London: Verso, 1983).34 Alphonso Lingis, Excesses: Eros & Culture (Albany: SUNY, 1983).

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and provisional, we can still posit three larger domains of orientation and relational

constants Others,things, and self36. From here, we might devise a set of

questions or protocols based on ranges of control and intimacy the self-presenting

a domain of greatest intimacy, personal practices and preferences. The domain of

Others is where identities, preferences and practices are negotiated in a muscularsocial setting. The domain ofthings incorporates all that which resists and must be

acted upon, and which despite all else, provides the ground for existence as such as

well as the stuff of sensuous experience fine, foul, and in between.

4.

If we begin from relational fields orienting us to Others, we might ask how the

animates could position and predispose, enable and/or inhibit us, to family? Here we

would include any variety of consanguine kinship or primary relations. Would

animates enliven felicitous family relations, as their prototypical forms and media

already promise to do? Animates could enable continuous monitoring of small

children by parents who may be at work or elsewhere. For example the animate

environment occupied by the child or its familiar childs could be constantly reading

the childs vital signs and metabolic processes and reporting any spikes, dips or

irregularities. As children grow up and leave, an animate might be able to re-create

precious moments, or perhaps sound a bit like Mom for the first few months of the

adolescents initial fight into independence. Might this, in extreme, develop into a

complete absence of independence as parents insist on monitoring their offspring, or

spouses each other? Might the animates strain family and kinship relations, or

perhaps come to subvert, or supplant them37?

Its not unimaginable that animates might come to play a role in our cults and

observances of our mortality and parting with those who go before us. What would

happen to an animate once (its/their) owner died? Would they become talking

grave-markers38, telling any passerby willing to listen the stories of owners long

done to dust? Might they become capsules for the dearly departed able to imitatethe lost one in voice and personalities on demand? In which case, would the beloved

have died? How might this condition our ways of understanding ourselves as

36 The categories are borrowed from Foucaults discussion of Kant in Michel Foucault, "What IsEnlightenment?," in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984).37 JG Ballard plays out a chilling variation on this theme. J.D. Ballard, "Myths of the near Future," in Mythsof the near Future (London: Jonathan Cape, 1982).38 Gary Gumpert, Talking Tombstones & Other Tales of the Media Age (New York: Oxford University Press,1987).

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mortals?

Kinship is a primary social environment in which we accede to a name and a face.

We learn order and ordinance39 as Lingis puts it, and our place in the bigger

scheme of things. And in the force field of family we also learn about what is ownand other, and our first predispositions to the neighbours. How might animates

orient or predispose us to the web of forces that make up neighbouring a constant

incorporating not only the neighbour across the fence, but the one across the

boundary. We learn the play of interests, powers and positions in the primary

environment in the midst of family; among neighbours we learn its name is politics.

The neighbour and we have something in common, always. Be it a fence, a border,

a pasture, a well. But we rarely have everything in common we cooperate and

compete, and we strive to make reality congenial to our own ends good news if it

accommodates the neighbours. If not, we negotiate, maneuver, build coalitions with

other neighbours and kinsfolk, and if all that fails, we proceed and deal with the

consequences, affirming Clauswitz famous dictum about war being politics

conducted by other means. What kind of effect could animates have in the political

sphere? Would they reflect the political orientations of their owners? Should they

have a public sphere of their own? Or would putting emotional capability into them

lead to them desiring a political agenda of their own, having learned the language of

emancipation and freedom as the greatest good from their masters40? Might they

hold elected office or act in proxy for an ill leader, or occupy any public post? If they

get to be smart enough to displace us from our jobs and benignly manage our lives,

why not the nation state?

How could the presence of intelligent and emotional machines affect how we

interrelate within and with institutions? For example, what roles for animates in our

legal systems? What legal status might they have? Would they be entitled to

rights41? Could animates own anything or enter into contractual relations either

39 Lingis, The Imperative.40 Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism.41 In a recent examination of the question Soskis writes:

At some point in the not-too-distant future, we might actually face a sentient, intelligent machine whodemands, or who many come to believe deserves, some form of legal protection. The plausibility of thisoccurrence is an extremely touchy subject in the artificial intelligence field, particularly since overoptimism[sic] and speculation about the future has often embarrassed the movement in the past. See, BenjaminSoskis, Man and the Machines (January-February) [Website] (Legalaffairs.Org, 2005 [cited 27 December2004]); available from http://www.legalaffairs.org/email/email.html?articleid=686.

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themselves or as proxies? Might they be given power of attorney by or for their

disabled or infirm owners? From another point of view, would everyone have a right

to do whatever pleased to and with an intelligent and emotional machine? In our

society we abhor cruelty to animals albeit living with various kinds. Would there be

a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animates in the future? Runaway animatesand an underground railway: where to in an age of GPS? While it is possible that in

the future we might have cause to extend compassion to the things weve made, we

may also pause to consider that these will bepowerfulmachines, and extensions of

ourselves and servants of our wills. We regulate firearms, will we regulate animates

too?

Not all our institutions have to do with the law indeed the nuclear family is a social

institution. So are the forms of education we provide the young, as are festivals and

holidays of various kinds. Many institutions provide a concrete basis for our cultures

and senses of what is true, good, and beautiful. Might this lively stuff come to

influence our aesthetic codes and arts, as well as how we value these institutions and

practices42? Already tools for media production are becoming a common feature on

many PCs. The keyboard has displaced chirography as a daily medium, will the

animates displace or condition our creativity and cultures of its expression? How

might they shape our relation to theatre, films, poetry, dance, performance and the

arts?

How might the animates affect or change our ideas about wealth, resources and

exchange? So far as the animates are concerned, would there be a basic model

coming as birthright and then levels of peripherals and performativities to

demonstrate invidious distinction, or might they make such a comparison obsolete?

We cant imagine animates being cheap to either make or allocate. For example, in

2004 Japanese master robotocist Mitsuo Kawato estimated that if provided $500

million a year for 30 years, he could produce a robot (note, a robot, not an animate)

with the intellect and capabilities of a five-year old child

43

. With this in mind, mightthe animates build the final insurmountable wall separating the global the haves and

have-nots? So we could ask: How could, would, should animates mediate wealth,

42 Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mass Reproduction," in Illuminations, ed. HannahArendt (New York: Schocken, 1969), John A Walker, Art in the Age of Mass Media, 3 ed. (London: Pluto,2001).43 Gregory T Huang, What We Can Learn from Computers [Website] (MIT Technology Review.Com,December, 2004 2005 [cited 31 December 2004]); available fromhttp://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/01/issue/huang0105.asp.

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resources, access? On the other hand, might the fact of their chameleon-like nature,

projected capacity for natural language interfaces, and need to exist in small

portable platforms, do away with the digital divide?

How might the animates condition how we approach wealth, satisfaction and satietywith and in possessions and powers, and what we imagine and enact as minimum

resource standards of social decency? The Barbie Doll, observed Hine, was not a toy

but a didactic device for teaching pre-pubescent girls to equate young adulthood,

glamour, fashion and consumption. Barbie, in effect, was and a remains a 3d

advertisement44. And the animates? If we can build appliances that burn out

solenoids right on cue after X hours of operation rendering them inoperable and

irreparable due to cost of labour relative cost of a new appliance45, what then of

animates? How could the animates affect global flows of capital? If, as is surely

possible in such a scenario, that nearly all human jobs and avocations are displaced

to animates who will buy all the lively stuff, never mind the inert goods and staples

of old?

Individually vulnerable creatures at best, we cleave to others and simultaneously

crave security -- the sense that we, our world with its order and ordinances,

relevances and relations, will be continuous and free of fear, violation, rough

treatment, dispossession, or assault. The orientation to security is already being

colonized by proto-animates witness the proliferation of home security or elderly-

monitoring systems that are connected to centralized communication nodes

themselves often in distant cities? Already proto-animates are being developed for

military and policing roles46. Are we prepared for intelligent killing machines and

networks 47? From a different perspective, might proxy armies come to replace real

44 Thomas Hine, Populuxe (New York: Knopf, 1987).45 Ralph Caplan, By Design: Why There Are No Locks on the Bathroom Doors in the Hotel Louis Xiv, and

Other Object Lessons (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1982).46 Noah Shachtman, More Robot Grunts Ready for Duty(WIRED News, 2004 [cited 02:00 AM Dec. 01, PT2004]); available from http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,65885,00.html.47 The First International Symposium on Roboethics, identified four areas of concern, first among them theethics of robotic weaponry. The conference listed as areas of attention:The ethics of robotic violence, killing and hunting machines, remote weapons, killing fields and networks;the ethics of implants [Cyborg technologies], remote sensing through and control of people and animals;the ethics of the user in interface: the users competence (mental, physical,) in command and control ofpowerful semiautonomous technologies; and finally, the ethics of the socialization, instruction andhumanization of robots.See: Bruce Sterling, Robots and the Rest of Us [Website] (Conde Nast, 2004 [cited December 2004]);available from http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.05/view.html?pg=4?tw=wn_tophead_7..

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ones turning war into a kind non-lethal mechanical ballet-cum-chess game48? Could

laws regulating speed of automobile travel be built into animates regulating cars like

mechanical regulators of old and thereby prevent the vehicle from exceeding speed

limits? Better yet, might the animate allow the speeding but automatically issue a

ticket for the infraction. Could OnStar fink? Might law enforcement be built intoshipments and storage facilities to guard and protect robocops on chips?

5.

Things

There is a sense in which our whole conjectural enterprise here is an extension or

elaboration of this category, because the lively stuff is, after all, part of our material

culture. We might begin with the body. Not-me/me at my ownmost, when visited

by ailments or fatigue, it becomes obdurate and a burden 49. It likes things my

reasoning mind knows are bad for me, and it and it is capable of embarrassing me

through its unruliness, needs and functions. As age sets in, it changes bringing

about a different sense of who I am to me. It is the seat of many of my pleasures

and the place of many pains and limitations, most private haven, and when fatigued,

inflicted, anguished, the most inescapable horror.

A wide range of questions open, some are being mapped, particularly the

implications of the Cyborg that entity that straddles us and the animates50. There

are other questions too: Transbodiment and remote effective presence, or

teleffectiveness. How might such teleffectiveness and remote sensing condition

our sense of embodiment, location, and the nature of Others? Indicators also

suggest enablement of multipresence, being at two events at the same time: This

too? Does this lead to a new distributed panopticon a variation on McLuhans

48 One has to doubt that this will be a robowars scenario, more likely this will not be a match betweenanimate warriors, but rather their deployment in search and destroy missions against urban fighters andinsurgents, to enforce occupations, peace treaties and so on. For robotics and automation in war see: DeLanda, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (New York: Swerve Editions, 1991). For the future of war

and weapon systems see: Gwynne Dyer, War: The New Edition (Toronto: Random House, 2004), RobertL O'Connell, Ride of the Second Horseman: The Birth & Death of War(New York: Oxford University Press,1995), Robert L. O'Connell, Of Arms and Men: A History of War, Weapons, and Aggression (New York:Oxford University Press, 1989). TALON, a robotic armed device currently in deployment seems like theperfect device for super powers in the savage dirty little wars that McLuhan, from his vantage point of thelate 60s, conjectured for our world. See Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, War and Peace in the GlobalVillage; an Inventory of Some of the Current Spastic Situations That Could Be Eliminated by MoreFeedforward, 1st -- ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968).49 Drew Leder, The Absent Body(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990)., and Elaine Scarry, TheBody in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World(New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).50 Donna Jeanne Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: FreeAssociation Books, 1991).

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nasty nosey global village (straight out of Miss Marples, but multicultural and even

more malevolent)51? What might it mean to have haptic or tactile interface through

a remote animate52. Would continuous compliance, attention, undying devotion

(providing the batteries last) and having all our needs cared for, lead to a

generalization of sloth, indolence, arrogance, and ennui these then encouragingbizarre entertainments, exploitative behaviours and . . .? And finally, what effect of

this lively stuff on Death, what we think it to be, how we approach it, how we live in

its presence? When you die, will your animate be terminated like some sacrificial

funerary victim? Or will we finally achieve a virtual immortality by delegate our

living to them while we take the Big Nap?

Among the things central to experience is our embodied need and loveof

sustenance. We can build a culture around something as humble as roots and

berries or as complex and rarified as haute cuisine. Historian Fernandez-Armesto

shows that alimentary culture has played a profound and generative role in the

history of our species, our cultures, institutions and imaginations53. What should we

expect to be the conditioning effects of our lively stuff on our relation to each other

through the media of food and drink, our orientations to it? How might animate

communication ecologies condition our experiences of the sources and practices of

provisioning and cultures of preparation, of distribution and access, and of the

meaning of food and nutrition? What if an animate could prepare a favourite dish as

only a parent could? New media, says Peters, are always devices for raising the

dead54. Would we have the urge to break bread with animates?

Needful things, or material culture, is large category and encompasses everything

people make or select from nature from transcontinental power grids to grid-like

hatching on a piece of ochre from 70,000 years ago55. Indications are that when the

51 Often misinterpreted as McLuhans utopian village of continuous and reciprocal communication, theglobal village was to be anything but. See: Marshall McLuhan, "Playboy Interview," Canadian Journal of

Communication (1989), Marshall McLuhan et al., Letters of Marshall Mcluhan (Toronto: Oxford UniversityPress Canada, 1987).52 Philip Ball, Robot Finger Has Feeling: Artificial Muscle Feels the Weight of Objects It Moves [Website](Nature Science Update, 2003 [cited 27 May 2003]); available from http://www.sci-con.org/archive/200304.html.53 Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Near a Thousand Tables: A History of Food(Toronto, ON: Key Porter,2002). With respect to eating and both our imaginations and conceptions of power, see the invaluablediscussions provided by Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power, trans. Carol Stewart (London: Penguin, 1962).54 John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1999).55 . David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origin of Art(New York: Thames& Hudson, 2002)..

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animates begin to spread, this will involve their proliferation through material culture

from substances to artefacts as their prototypes already have56, and to aggregates

and environments where we have also met their rudimentary forms.

We say needful things but the phrase clearly can be read both ways that its thethings that do the needing too -- what then will the animates need from us, from

each other? McLuhan insisted that each technology will generate a service

environment, what sort of infrastructure would the animates require, what kind of

environment would they create? And, as the key question inAIputs it: If we make

a machine that is capable of virtually or actually loving us, then are we obliged to

love it back? If the animates become granular and self-organizing, capable of

learning, lifelike and able to replicate themselves, how to understand them as a part

of an inert and obdurate materiality57? How are we to understand this very odd

transformation? What sort of reified animation or animated reification could this be?

Which life is devoid of its chores and ordeals? Writ larger, these include calamities,

disasters, catastrophes, loss and tragedy. In the miniscule (though no less

meaningful for all that), myriad irritations, frustrations and discomforts of life beset

us, each objective, painful, and no less thingly, obdurate, burdensome. Chores and

ordeals are where our orientations shade quickly into imperatives where we can

see thateconomy between could, ought or should, and must -- at its most

sharply defined. Chores and ordeals issue from Ananake, the ancient Greek goddess

of Necessity: The circumstances and imperatives out of our immediate if any

control, regardless of whose making or their provenance; those things which must be

overcome, worked with or through, sometimes endure and survive, and sometimes

not58. Natural disasters, wars, famine, bureaucracies run amok, epidemics, traffic

jams, poverty, lingering and debilitating sickness, an infinity of injustices large and

small, financial mishap these all potentially lie in wait around lifes next corner.

56 Michael Singer, Smart Dust Collecting in the Enterprise (Internetnews.Com, 2003 [cited 28 December

2004]); available from siliconvalley.internet.com/news/article.php/3098551.57 Christopher Meyer and Karl Jacob Jason Lohn, Dick Morley, Shana Ting Lipton, Marco Dorigo, AveryPennarun, Living Machines (WIRED, 2004 [cited 9 February 2004]); available fromhttp://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.02/machines_pr.html.58 It is a comment on the ancient patriarchal Greek order that the only force to which Zeus, masculineprinciple par excellence, had to bend both will and knee and know anxiety, was embodied in a slight girl.Anankes sister Nemesis or Retribution, also in the Greek imagination a slight beautiful girl but of aserious and somewhat sorrowful demeanor, often attended upon Necessity. She also commanded therespect or Zeus and the entire Olympic clan. Roberto Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony(Toronto: A. A. Knopf Canada, 1993), Robert Graves, Greek Myths (New York: George Braziller, 1957),Robert Graves and Grevel Lindop, The White Goddess : A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth (Manchester:Carcanet, 1997).

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As we get older we orient to these, feel their barb -- we buy insurance and RRSPs,

adopt healthier lifestyles, learn new cultures of

precautionary measures. Will the animates be exactly elements of such

precautionary measures: security guards, epi-medics, intelligence gatherers,

cognoscenti and fixers in their own ways?

How could animates mediate our orientation to the imperatives of ordeals and

chores? Which chores and ordeals might be obsolesced, as McLuhan put it in his

four-fold laws of media? McLuhans question about obsolescence is here most apt: a

significant part of their marketers pitch will be the promise of making many

irritations and perhaps sources of some deeper life-traumas obsolete. From

McLuhans point of view, obsolescence was not a finality, but a transitional state.

Another of the four laws posits that innovations precipitate processes of cultural

recovery or retrieval in addition to doing away with an irritant and providing

solutions. Which kinds of calamities, chores or ordeals might the animates then

revisit upon us? Where would we look to find out? Which anxieties, done away with

in times past by previous technological solutions, could lively stuff reintroduce into

our lives?

Our values and beliefs have an objective, thingly character; they are, of a sort first

and last things. Our values and beliefs are intermeshed with larger frameworks of

belief and cultural pattern we learn from or have disciplined into us in our habitus

and surrounding world. Nor is that intermesh always one of harmony or accord.

These things beliefs, values, stories, practices, rituals, images, buildings frame

life and, when rich and given as authentic to experience, provide a fine ameliorative

and source of heartening; in their absence or attenuation we begin the slow dance

into ennui and depression. What role for the animates in this relational constant and

force field?

How would the animates embody our values; how could they not? Would theyreassure us in our values? How would they go about doing this? Surely if Teddy is

to be a lifetime friend, teacher, mentor and guardian angel, then s/he/it be should

tuned into whatever the owner/user finds worth going to the wall for? If Teddy

is to be all these things, who would program the value-set -- the comprehension of

the order and ordinance ofsome things, of those relations, people, states and things

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substantial and impossible to exhaust -- into the machines mind59? If were not

just a little edgy about what TV, electronic games, the Internet and all the

commercial content are teaching the kids today, what should we expect when

teaching comes from an affective, patient, savvy 3D machine thats interactive,

ambulatory, rich media-enabled, networked, commercial, and always on to avirtually infinite range of information, data, entertainment and interpellation?

As with all the orientations and imperatives or constants of diaposon of human

relational possibilities, material culture frames and socially positions a user, an

owner of some kind, a self. Our conjectural protocol of questions should also

enable us to inquire into this sphere of experience and orientation. We could, for

example, begin by asking how the animates might impact, nuance, condition or

affect our sense and cultivations ofpersonhood?

6.

Self

The rhetorical strategy of the makers of the proto-animates60 is decidedly aimed at

an affective, interested, acquisitive, socially embedded, cognitive, appetent,

communicative self (equipped with appropriate resources or institutional access). If

were reading the signs right the language is certainly there the animates will

enterour lives precisely as intimate technologies61, and aimed directly into the

domain ofpersonhood. By personhood, we could understand an intensely

communicative and social, relational, mediated, and layered self, a human with

birthright to a face, a name, and place. Animates as associates, intimates,

extensions of an appetitive and conative self, would surely figure in how our sense of

personhood our own and that others could develop. For example, how might

they shape our conceptions of gender and its expressions and cultures? Would

animates be gendered, sexed, neither, either? In which dimensions could they

shape the ways we present ourselves to others and join the social dramaturgy that

59 A counterpoint: Borgmann & things focal with Csikszentmihalyi & things that mattered. AlbertBorgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life: A Philosophical Inquiry(Chicago: TheUniversity of Chicago Press, 1984), Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Halton, The Meaning ofThings: Domestic Symbols and the Self(Cambridge, Mss: University of Chicago Press, 1981).60 The rudimentary forms of animates AIBO, industrial robots, security environments, self-encryptingsystems and so on.61 This quite probably even as they are being imposedon us as institutional emanations and operatives.

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enables living with others62?

If the animates are to be the mediators of childrearing and then companions, then

some of the challenges before their makers can be drawn from Normans Teddy

article. Norman, a cognitive psychologist, points out that Teddys interactions withus would have to tread a delicate line between encouragement and criticism63.

Continuous encouragement positive feedback would be hazardous as it leads to

what amounts to suicidal arrogance. Continuous criticism would be debilitating.

How fine a level of language comprehension (in a multilingual world), situational

awareness, learning ability, affective receptivity, and perceptiveness would be

required of a machine for this kind of performance? How many computations a

nanosecond? Technological unobtainiums notwithstanding, one has to pause at the

thought of an object knowing you well enough to know when to push which ofyour

buttons. What would happen if you lost it? If it was bot-napped, hijacked,

hacked? Anyone who has lost an address book, laptop or cell phone knows what

thatfeels like; now imagine something even more no, most, intimate. How might

that impact ones sense ofpersonhood?

A self is always a self among and with others. We may be familied and live amongst

neighbours, with whom we may have hale or unhappy congress, but we also choose

-- and are chosen -- uniting into dyads and groups, networks of companions, friends,

mates. How might the animates shape our senses of, practices, and orientations to

conviviality, to friends, fellowship and companions? Or, might the animates put a

whole new dimension to parasocial relations into play64? Who needs humans that

are unreliable when Teddy always knows best anyway65? And what if Teddy could

be or share in some significant personality characteristics or qualities of your

favourite star from your favourite soap or show, movie or game, novel or other

cultural artefact? Of a lost friend? Or the friend you wished for and never had? On

arrival at ELIZAs site the supplicant is greeted with a white page, a question field

62 Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (New York: Harper & Row,1974), Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Doubleday Anchor Books ; A174.(Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1959).63 Norman, Turn Signals Are the Facial Expressions of Automobiles.64 The parasocial refers to an imaginary relationship that audiences believe they have with a personaor personality seen in the Media. We are using the term here, rather unorthodoxly, to cover any numberof imaginary relations with other social entities persons, groups and institutions.65 Ursula M. Franklin, The Real World of Technology, Rev. ed., C B C Massey Lecture Series. (Toronto,Ont.: Anansi, 1999).

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under text in bold 36 point proclaiming, ELIZA - a friend you could never have

before66.

The literature onplaygrows continuously as various forms of gaming become bigger

and bigger businesses. Play, games, and means we use to escape the everyday selfinto various alternative states of experience, context and consciousness are as much

a relational possibilities and imperatives as might be productivity67. In any of the

play modalities described by Caillois -- vertiginous, risk-taking, imitative, or

competitive -- which roles, and for which, of the animates68? Might the animates

finally usher in the perfect unity of pedagogy and play long sought by educators and

especially cost-conscious administrators69?

In a recent study of the origins of cave art, Lewis-Williams reminds us that the will to

ecstatic states appears to be universal human orientation, though its practices,

intensities and content, personal and social valuation and interpretations are culture-

specific70. Some by substance, some by dance and still others through meditation or

intense exertion we find many ways to manifest and feed that will. How might the

animates condition, play to, or on it? Which shapes might this lively stuff take when

combined with the will to escape the self? If they are to be teachers of the young

and intimates through life, might they also take on shamanic, therapeutic, cathartic,

confessional, purifying roles? What might that look like? What might that mean?

One of the great attractions of the animates will be in their play to and realization of

ourpreferences and tastes. Tastes and preferences can be a powerful orientation

bending other relational possibilities to the a logic its own; the heart has its

reasons. If Nietzsches to be believed, and perhaps his guess is as good as

anyones, preferences and tastes of an ancestor or ancestral group account for much

of cultural diversity71. We live, as McCracken observes, in an age of cultural

66http://www-ai.ijs.si/eliza-cgi-bin/eliza_script 67

Roger Caillois, Man, Play, and Games, trans. Meyer Barash (New York: Free Press, 1961), James F.Hans, The Play of the World(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981), Johan Huizinga, HomoLudens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture, trans. translator not given (Boston: Beacon Press, 1950),Lingis, Excesses: Eros & Culture..68 Caillois, Man, Play, and Games.69 Chandra Mukerji, From Graven Images: Patterns of Modern Materialism (New York: Columbia UniversityPress, 1983), Erik Strommen, B. J., "Interactive Toy Characters as Interfaces for Children," in Information

Appliances and Beyond: Interaction Design for Consumer Products, ed. Eric Bergman (San Francisco:Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 2000).70 Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origin of Art.71 Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche et al., The Gay Science: With a Prelude in German Rhymes and an Appendixof Songs, Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

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plenitude, and identity-group experimentation and speciation72. How would the lively

stuff accommodate or realize tastes? Which ones? What if someone preferred to

menace people with their animates? In a small world, one fellows preferences may

be the source of anothers homicidal rage. Might the animates, changeable and

compliant, orient us not only in, but to an ethics and political economy of preference,taste, personal expressions, experiments with and experiences.

How might the animates impact on personal expressions of institutional and cultural

ornamental and comportmental codes? Might they obsolesce the knapsack, briefcase

and handbag? How could they impact on our capacity for mimesis, our will to

cosmeisis and effects on us of the aesthetic imperative73, comply with them? a of

customized animate envelopment and self-presentation for it would be an

envelopmentby presences, in environments intelligent and filled with lively stuffand

a mobile extensions of them and it as part of daily kit.

A speculative species, we are given over to curiosity, conjecture, learning and

knowledge perhaps, along with language than enables them the adaptive

advantage of the species. As Innis has demonstrated, knowledge and media are

linked74. By way of a seeming tautology, how might the animates condition our

expectation, definitions and practices by which we know what we do, the ways we

enact citizenship, participation and access in an age of mediation of daily life by

animates as media? We may distinguish between two forms of media explicit and

There is an interesting resonance here in the organizational communication literature, particularly Wiecksobservations on the relationship between practice and the articulation of mission statement, with theformer regularly, if counter-intuitively, preceding the latter. See: K.E. Weick, "Sensemaking inOrganizations: Small Structures with Large Consequences.," in Making Sense of the Organization.(Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2001), Karl E. Weick, Making Sense of the Organization(Oxford, UK ; Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2001).72Grant David McCracken, Plenitude, ed. Grant David McCracken, Culture by Commotion; Book 1.(Toronto: Periph.:Fluide, 1997).73 Comportment refers to the way in which we carry and present ourselves in has to do with bearing,posture, attitude as well as clothing and grooming. Ornament could be seen as content or vocabulary ofthis larger material discourse of the self. This appears to be a universal structure. See Daniel Miller,

Material Culture and Mass Consumption, Ted Polhemus, Body Styles (Luton, Beds: Lennard Pub. inassociation with Channel Four Television Co., 1988). For a suggestive discussion of the aestheticimperative in broad, contemporary and particularly polemical contexts see: Virginia Postrel, TheSubstance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture & Consciousness(New York: Harper Collins, 2003), Penny Sparke,As Long as It's Pink: The Sexual Politics of Taste(London ; San Francisco, Calif.: Pandora, 1995).74 Harold Innis, The Bias of Communication (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1952), Harold AdamsInnis and Dave Godfrey, Empire & Communications, Rev. ed. (Victoria, B.C.: Press Porcpic, 1986), andalso the recent intellectual biography by Paul Heyer, Harold Innis, Critical Media Studies. (Lanham, Md.:Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), Harold Innis, The Bias of Communication (Toronto: University of TorontoPress, 1952), Harold Adams Innis and Dave Godfrey, Empire & Communications, Rev. ed. (Victoria, B.C.:Press Porcpic, 1986).

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implicit75. Implicit media are those elements of our material culture that are meant

to serve purposes outside or beyond what we normally think of as communication.

Their forms, colours, and physical properties are a subtle medium for social

communication76. Explicit media on the other hand refers to those elements of

material culture that are produced solely to convey messages radios, books,posters, telephones etc. To be sure, the two categories are not mutually exclusive:

for example, the sculptural form of a TV says something about it and designers

regularly incorporate explicit media by using text and readily accessible symbols,

word-marks and logotypes on many of the things that are produced. The animates

would completely integrate the two categories producing something of a

gesamtkunstwerk. How could this affect or shape our orientation to communication?

To knowledge To what left of your pitiful mnemonic abilities? one can almost hear

Platos Socrates saying77.

As media explicit that is as things that send and receive as well as implicitmedia

what roles might animates play in our lives? We are oriented to knowing and

communicating, to telling, expounding, showing, demonstrating, remonstrating,

representing. How might such media affect our ability to express what we know,

interrogate what we find suspicious, investigate what spurs our attention, share what

we learn and need to know, negotiate equitable relations within the political

economies of knowledge, and to listen and hear what matters in our communication

circumstances and ecologies? How might they improve on our abilities? Or, again to

return to McLuhans laws, how might the animates become too much of a good

thing? Might they reverse the benefit as we push them to the peak of their

technical form? When they push us to our communicative and cognitive capacities?

Will access be an entitlement, or a sentence? Will we be able to off-load an

evermore schizophrenic world (to borrow from Baudrillard78) or need continuous

upgrades to ward-off interpellation through every new conduit to the world the

75

Roman Onufrijchuk, First Things First(Centre for Policy Research on Science and Technology, 2005[cited January 2005]); available from http://arago.cprost.sfu.ca/cmns804/.76 Richard Buchanan, "Declaration by Design: Rhetoric, Argument, and Demonstration in Design Practice,"in Design Discourse: History/Theory/Criticism, ed. Victor Margolin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1989), Richard. Buchanan, "Design and the New Rhetoric: Productive Arts in thePhilosophy of Culture.," in Philosophy and Rhetoric, ed. Gerard A. Hauser (2001).77 Eric Alfred Havelock, The Muse Learns to Write: Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to thePresent(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), Eric Alfred Havelock, Preface to Plato, History of theGreek Mind ; V.1. (Cambridge: Belknap P. Harvard U.P., 1963), Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy : TheTechnologizing of the Word, New Accents. (London ; New York: Methuen, 1982).78 Jean Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication, trans. Caroline Schultze (New York: Semiotexte,1987).

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animates might offer?

Our knowledge of the world, dependent on media and communication practices, is

first received from our primary caregivers usually families and parents. We have

already pointed out the importance accorded to the habitus and the role played in itby family, nuclear and extended. How long before the child, caught up in a loop of

why, and why, and why . . ., and having repeatedly been referred to its Teddy,

stops asking the parent in the first place? Does this role, like the role of the

extended family in primary education, become obsolete, and parenting as its defined

with it? If knowledge is something we learn so that it can be with us ready to hand

in Heideggers language, then why learn anything at all if Teddy is there all the time?

Might we off load, or deputize the lively stuff to knowing for us, on our behalf?

We are oriented to rest and respite no less than to commotion, communication and

community. While play is always active, our orientation to rest adheres to the

private, the self-enclosed, -- perhaps to a therapeutic solipsism and meditative

pottering, messing, snoozing, dozing and lazing, hanging out and farting about in

other words, to license and, as Chesterton put it, the right to be left alone 79. If, as

the Ancient Greeks suggested, interaction (cohabitation) with ones animates

adheres the golden mean, might they enable deeper reflection, flow states, encasing

us in a restorative cone of silence? Might they become a cocoon, a final and

excellent denial of the inevitable need for cooperation and redemptive conflict Buber

accords to living with others80? And how might the animates mediate our needfor

and experience of rest and respite, for these can be declined or attenuated as can

any orientation. Indeed, how might the lively stuff affect how we think and what

counts as either, rest or respite? How could they position our expectations of what

entitlement of rest or relief from communicating be accorded others, to the limits to

our apparently insatiable desire to connect?

Teddy, suggests Norman, would accompany us from toddler to tomb. How would thelively stuff, of which (of whom?) Teddys the cute and cuddly top of the iceberg,

condition our personal, cultural, and social views about the temporality and

fatality of lifecourse. If every heart has it reasons, so also its seasons. Would the

79 Witold Rybczynski, Waiting for the Weekend(New York, N.Y., U.S.A.: Viking, 1991)..80 Martin Buber and Asher Biemann, The Martin Buber Reader: Essential Writings (New York: Palgrave,2002).

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animates affect how we understand the meaning of the stages of our own lives or

those of others? How might our understandings about and attitudes toward age and

aging be mediated? How could this shape social policy and practice? Would our

notions and expectations of childhood and, as already suggested, practices child-

rearing change? Will a childs Teddy have all the functionalities of an adults? Wouldlevels of functionality need rating, as are TV, movies and games? If, as the

consensus of projections emphasizes, carebots for the elderly are one of the key

innovation drivers, then how might they redefine what, who, and for what, the

elderly are and how they ought be disposed within our societies?

Ending the survey we might note that the difference between surviving and living is

in the degree to which lifes climate is felicitously accommodating of what matters --

to ourprojects and passions. If first and last things values create a climate for

the meaningful in life, projects are its concrete and pragmatic manifestations. Work,

our jobs, our vocations, families, sailing around the world, getting through today,

can all be sources of, sites for, and projects themselves. The orientation to

meaningful engagement with the world can turn any of the other orientations or

aspects of them into projects or a Project; witness the role of family in some

communities. Orientation to the realization of some purpose or project to expand,

to enable, to elaborate, enlighten, ensure, explain, escape provide the calloused

proofs for the reasons why on those dark nights of the soul. In which modes and

by what means will the animates enable projects and feed passions? Would

everyone, regardless of projects potential or previous, be entitled to powerful and

intelligent technologies to help realize any project they can dream up? How would

we regulate? How might the animates alter or condition what we take to be valid or

valuable projects? Could they, and our relations with them, become projects and

passions too?

We arrive at a set of points of departure, sites from which to begin to survey the

possible topography ahead. This protocol, modeled on the human circumstance, itsrelational constants and their correlate settings, orientations, and imperatives is

incomple

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