Page 16 - Cyberculture and New Media

Francisco J. Ricardo 7
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thinking, and stimulus-response behaviour. Since such logic, thinking, and
behaviour are conditioned early, at the point of interface design, they precede
many possibilities for creative latitude at the individual level, imposing
constraints of experience whose processing does not entirely originate within
the user alone. The presence of design and interaction intrudes on expressive
freedom with presupposing inferences that guide, limit, and accompany real-
time reasoning with an array of predetermined tasks that the interface
performs in producing whatever solution or feedback the given technology
generates. As if to underscore a major formalist divide, the major thinking in
fact occurs at great temporal remove prior to that which happens in real-time
use, such that the design, manufacture, and functionality of an automated
teller machine exceedingly dwarfs the mental commitment required to use it.
The same holds for cybercultural experiences like viewing films,
chatting via mobile phones, or piloting airplanes. Time and labour have been
divided, with the medium presenting much of the problem’s solution already
elaborated, leaving little of what executes in the present to its calculation in
the here and now. It is by following its idiosyncratic impression of historical
progress that technology increasingly alters this balance; to define
cyberculture is to witness a further skewing of one particular asymmetry that
follows the simultaneous and mutually exclusive aims of increasing
complexity of construction on one end in order to augment ease of use on the
other. To be sure, the human record provides no other model of collective
existence in which social artefacts and affordances are divided so radically,
save that which takes root in the rise of technology for organic tasks, let us
say farming and transportation – technologies whose own horizons have
advanced so far as to merit their own histories. But in those early
deployments, the only factor subject to transformation is the labour of a task;
the identity of the user remains integral to its pre-technological history; even
today, the farmer is no less a farmer because he uses a mechanised tractor
rather than a manual hoe. This continuation of role-person is maintained
precisely because in the narrowness of the task provided, the technology does
none of the actual thinking involved in the work. Thinking is at that stage still
exogenous to labour, the latter being the only objective of the technological
intervention. But once the horizon of technological possibility on the
dimension of labour is largely conquered, the remaining challenges, now
cognitive, become fertile ground for a parallel incursion.
It is in the 20th century when, confronted by military circumstances,
that governments launch into major initiatives for technological performance
in the cognitive rather than manual realm alone: to design anticipatory
intelligence into field artillery, to decrypt enemy communications, and to
calculate the procurement of materiel to large-scale operations, among other
marvels of intellectual execution, these and countless other objectives are
attempts at consolidating intelligence into code. For these unprecedented