Ubiquitous Computing, Complexity and Culture

Ulrik Ekman, Jay David Bolter, Lily Diaz, Morten Sondergaard, Maria Engberg, Ulrik Ekman, Jay David Bolter, Lily Diaz, Morten Sondergaard, Maria Engberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317704560
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Computer Science General
• Index: Computer Science

The ubiquitous nature of mobile and pervasive computing has begun to reshape and complicate our notions of space, time, and identity. In this collection, over thirty internationally recognized contributors reflect on ubiquitous computing's implications for the ways in which we interact with our environments, experience time, and develop identities individually and socially. Interviews with working media artists lend further perspectives on these cultural transformations. Drawing on cultural theory, new media art studies, human-computer interaction theory, and software studies, this cutting-edge book critically unpacks the complex ubiquity-effects confronting us every day.

The companion website can be found here: http://ubiquity.dk

Part I Individuating

Individuations

Ulrik Ekman

DOI: 10.4324/9781315781129-1

Does ubicomp culture mean that individuals and social groups develop and evolve differently, and are the whole of such individuations to be approached as a matter of complexity? Does ubicomp culture imply that computational entities, networks, software systems, interaction designs, and media become concretized differently, and must this as a whole be considered in terms of complexity? Is the term “ubicomp culture” to be understood as a short and somewhat artificial neologism in which hides some well-known distinction between the becoming of humans and the becoming of machines that will permit one to decompose each in some scientific manner, or does this term rather signal that that they remain intimately intertwined, co-emerge, and codevelop in a complex and perhaps non-decomposable sense?

This book section includes ten chapters engaging in depth with key aspects of such questions, moving towards a demonstration of the ways in which individuating with ubicomp culture might be considered complex, perhaps in ways permitting reduction, satisficing, or approximate solutions, or in some cases permitting only an acknowledgment of irreducible complexity in the face of problems that can only be worked on in one-to-one simulative correspondence.

The notion of “individuation” can here be read in a broadly metaphorical sense, as somewhat synonymous with psychological, subjective, and egological development, or grouped and social development, or organized, organic, and biological development, or technical, machinic, and algorithmic development. However, both this text and the entire anthology also include an invitation to reconsider this notion via an encounter with the way in which it is thought in the work of Gilbert Simondon.¹ This is tantamount to grasping an individual in a very general sense and as a relative reality: As an effect or a momentary result of an ontogenetic and relational process or operationality. An individual subjectivity-effect along with a collective sociality-effect are phases of concretization in a relational process of becoming. Such effects imply both a preindividual state and, after a phase of individuation, a remainder of a preindividual potential still to be actualized in coming individuations. Moreover, psychic and social individuations would here form only part of an ontogenetic process seeing to the development of a larger entity that involves the biological, the technical, and the environment or milieu.² Psychic and social individuations are partial and relative resolutions or concretizations appearing in a larger system that contains both a multiplicity of latent potentials and a distinct tension, a disparateness, or an incompatibility with itself.

More specifically as regards the key concerns of this book, this would entail a reconsideration of subjective and social becomings with ubicomp developments as a matter of complexification emerging from the processing and structuring of preindividual potentials. The complexity of individuated ubicomp culture is then a problem solution qua a phase in a transformative topological experiment. This transformative becoming concerns a complex transport of parts and relations from an external or extracultural environment across ubicomp technics as a membrane, skin, or medium to an inner-cultural environment for social and individual lives, and back, with a difference. Here technical and human cultural individuations are less distinct than being in transduction: The two terms are in co-emergent development and this is constituted by their relationality. Ubicomp technics would here be the process with which human individuals and social groups develop environmentally: The inner cultural milieux of an “I” and a “we” emerge with the ongoing maintenance of technics as a membrane to exterior milieux. Ubicomp technics become less as our other than as the envelope, curtain, or membrane for continuous bidirectional relational transports between environments exterior and interior to the developmental processes of human culture, network societies, social groups, and individual lives. The complexity at stake concerns what is concretized “inside” as an intricate cultural organization, “outside” as exteriorities of organized and disorganized complexity, and topologically as technics of selectivity (self-maintenance of individuation at and as a membrane that remains asymmetrical and polarized, permitting the centrifugal or centripetal transport of certain energies and bodies while opposing others). The synchronic emergence or processual structuration of a ubicomp culture is not solely a matter of integration and differentiation. It is also a matter of transduction understood as a prior dynamic, relational topology. A continuous technical or informative process generates numerous mediations—as a result of which interiorities and exteriorities arrive at the poles.

It is an open question whether living and developing with ubiquitous computing, individually and socially, is a relatively simple problem that can be reduced and solved by considering a few variables at play. It might be a problem of organized complexity with a moderate number of variables and relations that could be dealt with via computers and transdisciplinary research in the social and biological sciences. Perhaps it is rather a problem residing with disorganized complexity whose many variables will call on statistical tools and probability analysis.³ However, it may remain a problem of irreducible complexity that admits only of direct simulation or trying.⁴

The contributions to this first of three large book sections making up this anthology address the issue of potentially complex technocultural individuating along four interconnected paths, each concerned with one dynamic layer or set of relations in ubicomp culture, that is, those of cultural theory, media art, interaction design, and software studies. Naturally, the choice of these paths is a forcing and gives only a subset; it is a reduction made in view of the (considerable but not infinite) expertise of the contributing researchers. It nonetheless permits a first investigation of four key fields in which the question concerning the potential complexity of ubicomp culture is already pressing and unresolved. Given that each of the three large book sections operates along these four paths, the reader may want to consider them as staying concerns that reflect an engagement that gradually pushes towards the immanence of ubicomp culture, stopping short of any extended address of issues in such fields as coding and programming, hardware engineering, organic biology, chemistry, and physics.

As Lily Diaz remarks in her interim text below, individuations with ubicomp culture pose thought-provoking questions to the ways in which cultural theories of individuation are to operate vis-á-vis the potential complexity of culture, technology, and the environment. The chapters by Mark B. Hansen, Erin Manning, Lily Diaz, and Morten Søndergaard present engagements with different parts of this, just as they indicate quite different approaches to be taken when considering the key issue of reductionism versus a more or less strong position in complexity theory.

For example, both Hansen and Diaz treat the way in which individuals and social groups currently live and develop with the billions of processors and software systems in context-aware and anticipatory ubiquitous computing and agree that it is far from obvious that the distinction between human and machine can be upheld in any strict or traditional sense. Here Hansen moves very far towards a strong position in complexity theory such as one might find it in the work of representatives from the hard sciences as well as in the social and human sciences.⁵ He proposes the pursuit of a strong “objective” rethinking of the phenomenological tradition that will alter it so as to meet mediation, ubicomp technics, and the disorganized or even irreducible complexity of the appearance of the world at a quantum level (de)constitutive of any intentional subjective consciousness. Ubicomp technics, and relational databases in particular, thus proffer a dynamic and multiplicitous topological relationality in and of the sensible, which lets us as human subjectivities and socialities individuate with an expanded preindividual sensibility that operates prior to intentional consciousness and not necessarily in anthropocentric ways. Diaz, however, proposes that the complexity of ubicomp culture and surveillance systems is to be met by a nuanced reductionism, specifically the reductions of complexity in a systems theory (inspired by the work of Niklas Luhmann and Gregory Bateson). This, according to Diaz, will allow one to see that the complexity of human psychological and social systems and their development are of a different order from the complexity of ubicomp systems and their development. Quite contrary to Hansen, Diaz contends that the understanding of the world available through human observation is of a different order and type from the sensor-mediated form of observation and surveillance now to be found in the context-aware systems of ubicomp. Notably, media art projects and art systems permit of the generation of forms for the observations of observations, a kind of second-order move and reflexivity with a critical or “irritating” potential not to be found in ubicomp systems. In effect, where Hansen finds in ubicomp technics the very potential for expanded development of humans and their sensibility towards complexity, Diaz tends to find for the most part a reduction, a potential loss of human agency, quality of life, and critical reflexivity.

Morten Søndergaard’s introduction to “Media Art” and the interviews with media artists, David Rokeby and Teri Rueb, in this section echo some of the concerns voiced by Diaz, especially as regards the perhaps special role played in the complexification of ubicomp culture by creative and critical potentials, not least those to be found in media art. When interviewed, Rokeby will also accord a certain privilege to human culture and in particular its media art projects. The interrelations and feedback loops between human interactants and computational systems in art projects such as Very Nervous System (1986–1990) and The Giver of Names (1991) can certainly be seen as precursors of more or less autonomous and intelligently human-oriented systems in ubiquitous and pervasive computing, perhaps not so much the billions of autonomous software agents calmly at work infrastructurally in networks as the more overt and personalized intelligent assistants we now begin to live with more continuously (e.g. GPS, Siri, Cortana, Google Now). His work on such art projects has led Rokeby to acknowledge that complexity and emergence are to be found on both sides and in their interactions. However, even if Rokeby grants the computational systems with which we now live something like behaviors resembling autonomy and demonstrating emergent effects from human and technical networkings, he will eventually insist on an anthropocentric privilege, both in principle and in his own media art projects. That is, when we consider a struggle between human and technical, complexity and control, and between valuing or protecting ourselves and celebrating the different capabilities of others (such as these technical systems), Rokeby will explore in detail the potentials for codevelopment but first and last rest with the human. Rokeby will perhaps grant that we evolve with our intelligent ubicomp environment and that this also enables certain transformative mirrorings of human complexity. However, he will not just trust technical emergence but insist on privileging a certain human freedom, human creativity, and a critical discussion of values over and above developments of technical control and autonomy.

Ever since Mark Weiser’s first coinage in the first half of the 1990s of the terms “ubicomp” and “calm computing,” (Weiser 1991) an important part of the research and development in the fields of human–computer interaction (HCI) and interaction design has been preoccupied with the issue of how to navigate between the freedom and the control of agency, across the situations and events involving ubicomp systems and human interactants. It is still a matter of some debate whether and how interaction designs for ubicomp culture are to tend towards the transparent and calm invisibility of an infrastructure for interactivity or towards a more personalized, attention-getting, even exciting unfolding, and mediatory laying bare of potential paths for technocultural interrelations and interactivities.⁶ It is much less discussed and still far from clear, however, what complexities might be lurking in the arrival of multitudes of smart human-oriented interaction designs which are to foresee, enable, maintain, and adapt event-wise to the meaningful, intentional interactions of human in a given situation. Likewise, research is still much in the dark with respect to the kinds of complexity that could be said to be at stake in the novel organizations of humans, their practices, their environment, and their time when living on and individuating with such ubicomp interaction designs. Not least, we have seen very little research capable of following the fate of the potential complexities of what emerges from the ongoing dynamic interrelations of smart ubicomp interaction designs and the more implicit “interaction designs” embedded not in computational entities but in the embodied practices of ever so many parts of human everyday cultures.

In his more detailed interim text on interaction designs and individuation, Jay David Bolter remarks both on this unresolved state of affairs and on the ways in which such issues are broached in the chapter contributions by Simon Penny, Irene Mavromatti, and Jon Dovey. It is quite thought-provoking to observe, for example, the differences it makes to be working from within the disciplines of HCI and computer science, as Mavromatti, or from within the discipline of cultural and medial studies of pervasive computing, as Dovey. Neither Mavromatti nor Dovey focuses on the issue of free versus controlled agency so as to...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Contributors
• Foreword: N. Katherine Hayles
• Introduction Complex Ubiquity-Effects
• Part I Individuating
• Part II Situating
• Part III Eventualizing
• Index