Part II: Things People Play With
Hello babies. Welcome to The Internet.
You know if you wanted to make money today… I’m no economist, but I’ll bet the thing to do would be to invest your money in something like cameras. Things that people play with. Things that they are fascinated by. These fascinations are the creations of new activities.
- Joseph Campbell
For RoboTutor, we needed a way for students to log in to a unique profile so we could track their progress and ensure they were seeing appropriately-leveled content. We tried a solution called FaceLogin, having the students log in by taking a picture of themselves, and then later selecting their photo from a gallery.
Field research indicated that this is not what happened. In one of our beta-testing sites, most of the kids had zero to little experience seeing pictures of themselves, let alone taking their own photos or videos. There was only one mirror in the whole village, at the local barber shop. The opportunity to take a selfie was too enticing! This led to students taking many photos of themselves, instead of logging in with the same photo every time.
In Foucault’s lecture on Technologies of the Self, he outlines four major types of “technologies”.
(1) technologies of production, which permit us to produce, transform, or manipulate things
(2) technologies of sign systems, which permit us to use signs, meanings, symbols, or signification
(3) technologies of power, which determine the conduct of individuals and submit them to certain ends of domination, an objectivizing of the subject
(4) technologies of the self, which permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality
The stated goal of the Global Learning XPrize was to help children learn to read, write, and do mathematics. Which of Foucault’s four categories would this fall under? You guessed it, technologies of sign systems.
But it would be silly to ignore the possibility of these tablets to act as technologies of the self. Some of the finalist teams built software experiences that had some very small aspects of the self. For instance, a student could gain experience points and then use that to feed fish or hatch eggs. These little metacognitive petting zoos could provide some sense of reflection on the student’s progress. But this is still a long way from constructing personal identities with photos, on sites that many others will see!
In The Informational Nature of Personal Identity, philosopher Luciano Floridi suggests that ICTs (Information and Communication Technologies) act as a Technology of the Self. This might be obvious to anyone who has ever built a social media profile. But for a village that did not even have mirrors and then suddenly received magic tablets that can take your photo, to me this seems like a huge jump. Our western progression has been gradual. We’ve already lived through the Century of the Self, with radios and television along the way.
Floridi elucidates some very interesting concepts. One of which is The Digital Gaze.
The gaze is a composite phenomenon, with a long and valuable tradition of analyses (Lacan, Foucault, Sartre, Feminist theory). The idea is rather straightforward: the self observes “the observation of itself” by other selves through some medium. It is comparable to seeing oneself as seen by others, by using a mirror (“what people see when they see me?”). In child development, the gazing phase is theorised as a perfectly healthy and normal stage, during which the individual learns to see her or himself by impersonating, for example, a chair (‘‘how does the chair sees me?’’), or simply placing her or himself in someone’s shoes, as the phrase goes. The digital gaze is the transfer of such phenomenon in online environments. The self tries to see how others see itself, by relying on information technologies, which greatly facilitate the gazing experience.
What can the next “social media” sites look like? Perhaps instead of calling them merely “social media", we should also call them “ecologies of the digital gaze”?