Over the weekend, I was at the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria (where Creative Commons won a Golden Nica, by the way). The festival is always quite a lot of fun and is accompanied by an interesting conference. At the conference on Saturday, Sherry Turkle from MIT gave an interesting talk on the interaction and connection between computers and people in the co-construction of identity. She identified three phases regarding research on this interaction:
- During the first phase, research focused on interactions between one person and one computer.
- During the second phase, research focused on interactions among several persons using computers, i.e. interactions over the Internet
- In the third phase, research is now focusing again on interactions between one person and one computer, but on interactions of a different kind. Starting from examples such as the Tamagochi, Sony's Aibo dog and various computer dolls and toys developed at MIT's Media and Artificial Intelligence Labs, Sherry argued that computers which are specifically designed to maximize social interaction will become very important in the future: "Nurturing computers will be the 'killer application'" (and, yes, the tension between "nurturing" and "killer app" was mentioned by a member of the audience).
As empirical studies demonstrate, human beings are increasingly drawn into seeing such "nurturing computers" as companions, as subjects. Thereby, Sherry argued, we will increasingly become vulnerable to the intentions uttered and attentions seeked by such computers. Sherry concluded that future debates about the interaction between computers and people will focus on our vulnerabilities to the effects such computers will have on us.
While this is an interesting thought in its own right, what struck me during Sherry's presentation was the kind of examples she used. The Tamagochi originated in Japan and was a huge commercial success in many countries across the globe. The Aibo dog is Sony's attempt to offer a high-end gadget for high-end digeratis. And one of the computer dolls from MIT which Sherry mentioned was later put on the U.S. market by Hasbro.
The similarity between those three examples is, of course, that they are offered by large commercial players. Currently, there is a huge debate going on about how content and, indeed, culture, should be produced on and distributed over the Internet and mass-media channels. Different modes of cultural production have a direct impact on the status of a society as a whole and each member of the society. If one takes into account that the kind of computers Sherry talked about ("nurturing computers") will develop pretty deep and personal relationships with their owners, it seems interesting to think about how different modes of designing such computers may influence the computers' relationships with their owners. A person will probably develop a very different relationship to a mass-marketed, buy-off-the-shelf nurturing computer than to a modular and flexible computer that is based on some kind of open source approach and whose properties can be determined to a very large degree by its owner.
I have no answers to these questions, these are just some thoughts. But that's what, to a large extent, Ars Electronica and, indeed, blogging, is all about, isn't it?