Technobiophilia

Nature and Cyberspace

Sue Thomas

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781849660396
• eBook ISBN: 9781849662161
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Digital Media
• Index: Computer Science

Why are there so many nature metaphors - clouds, rivers, streams, viruses, and bugs - in the language of the internet? Why do we adorn our screens with exotic images of forests, waterfalls, animals and beaches? In Technobiophilia: Nature and Cyberspace, Sue Thomas interrogates the prevalence online of nature-derived metaphors and imagery and comes to a surprising conclusion. The root of this trend, she believes, lies in biophilia, defined by biologist E.O. Wilson as 'the innate attraction to life and lifelike processes'. In this wide-ranging transdisciplinary study she explores the strong thread of biophilia which runs through our online lives, a phenomenon she calls 'technobiophilia', or, the 'innate attraction to life and lifelike processes as they appear in technology'. The restorative qualities of biophilia can alleviate mental fatigue and enhance our capacity for directed attention, soothing our connected minds and easing our relationship with computers. Technobiophilia: Nature and Cyberspace offers new insights on what is commonly known as 'work-life balance'. It explores ways to make our peace with technology-induced anxiety and achieve a 'tech-nature balance' through practical experiments designed to enhance our digital lives indoors, outdoors, and online. The book draws on a long history of literature on nature and technology and breaks new ground as the first to link the two. Its accessible style will attract the general reader, whilst the clear definition of key terms and concepts throughout should appeal to undergraduates and postgraduates of new media and communication studies, internet studies, environmental psychology, and human-computer interaction. www.technobiophilia.com

1

A place so new that some things still lack names

Like Copernicus, we are privileged to witness the dawning of a new kind of space.

MARGARET WERTHEIM, AUTHOR¹

Life

The web smells like life.

KEVIN KELLY, founding executive editor of Wired magazine²

It is late afternoon in winter and you are weary. You have been reading and writing emails for hours; now you raise your eyes from the screen just as street lamps start to come on outside. Beyond the window cars and buses glide by, their headlights catching the pale faces of shoppers and children coming home from school. You feel trapped in a grey world. Turning back to your device, you sigh, slip in your ear buds, and open a web browser to search for some relief. Just for a moment, you need to be somewhere else, somewhere bright and warm. As you click around, a video catches your eye and you discover . . .

. . . deer wandering through a sunlit forest glade. Birds sing, a stream rushes by, people are quietly working. You notice an odd wooden structure, a complicated camera rig, and a man with a megaphone. He says ‘Take One’. Someone sets a wooden ball onto a series of carpentered rails built like a long thin staircase. The ball alternately rolls and falls from one step to the next. Every time it drops, the impact generates a single musical note. Then another. You realize you are looking at an exquisitely designed giant marimba and, what is more, it is playing a familiar piece of music – Bach’s cantata ‘Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring’. Eventually the ball rolls to an exact stop on a wooden ledge where two mobile phones stand side-by-side, one facing to the front, the other to the back. It is a surprise to find these hi-tech devices in this woodland grove. The screen of each phone is rectangular just like other smartphones but the case is unusual in that it is made from real cypress wood and smoothly curved to fit perfectly in the palm. The grain of each is different from the other because, of course, no two slices of wood look the same.

This is a promotional video for the Sharp Touch Wood SH-08C,³ filmed in a forest on the island of Kyushu, Japan. The combination of wild nature with state-of-the-art technology may at first appear incongruous, but in the pages ahead we shall come to understand how thousands of years of human experience lie behind the design and marketing of this very contemporary piece of kit which has been encased in an ancient material and ‘discovered’ in a stand of trees.

As the film comes to an end there is a brief moment when your imagination places the phone into your hand and you can almost smell the tangy aroma of the forest. Then another email pops up and you are back in the real world of any desk anywhere. But your brief excursion has made you feel just a little refreshed and before opening the mail you follow the link in the video to check out where you might be able to buy such a phone. Maybe it would be good to own that piece of real wood, to gaze at its patterns and feel its warmth between your fingers.

This kind of momentary reverie at the computer transports us into natural spaces which are very different from the industrial plastic and glass of modern life, and an increasing number of technology companies know that appealing to our love of nature in order to sell high-tech products is both powerful and influential. But how did this seemingly incongruous synergy come about?

It seems to be connected to the fact that as the internet developed, it generated new kinds of experiences and encounters, such as ‘being online’, and new kinds of innovations then grew up alongside them. But all these tools and designs needed names, and many of the names we gave them drew upon metaphors from the natural world. These terms were not imposed on us and there was no single person directing them; rather, they seem to have evolved as part of the haphazard lingua franca of cyberspace. If the idea seems unlikely, consider this: just as the town of Macondo in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ novel One Hundred Years of Solitude was ‘so new that some things still lacked names’,⁴ so it was too with cyberspace. And even today the language of computers and cyberspace is still saturated with images from nature: fields, webs, streams, rivers, trails, paths, torrents and islands; flora, including apples, blackberries, trees, roots and branches; and fauna, such as spiders, viruses, worms, pythons, lynxes, gophers, not to mention the ubiquitous bug and mouse. This is somewhat surprising since internet culture is an entirely new construction built by human beings who mostly live in cities, and until very recently our engagements with it have taken place largely indoors because computers have needed to be close to an electricity supply. The advent of better batteries and mobile technologies is now changing that, but why should cyberspace have any relationship with nature anyway? As we shall see, the reasons are both unexpected and comforting in a world driven by anxieties about the effects of technology on our health and well-being.

The problem with cyberspace is that we love it and we fear that we love it too much. When it comes to our phones, tablets and computers we are constantly torn apart by passion and guilt in equal measures. Are they making us addicted? Anti-social? Brainless? But how can that be when they also make us so happy? Strange as it may seem, there could be a connection between our passion for cyberspace and our affection for the natural world. Extensive research by environmental psychologists and social biologists has already demonstrated that exposure to nature helps us in many different ways such as relieving stress and restoring attention and concentration. Author Richard Louv, who coined the term ‘nature deficit disorder’, writes ‘The more high-tech our lives become, the more nature we need to achieve natural balance.’⁵ It might seem important, therefore, that we turn off our machines and go outdoors, and there are certainly many times when this is advisable. But the situation is more complicated than that. My research shows that some of the features we so value in the natural world can also be found online; indeed, our subconscious has already imprinted nature into cyberspace. Now we need to recognize how that is happening and harness it for ourselves.

In the following pages I explore a new twist on what is commonly known as ‘work–life balance’. I will show how we might make our peace with technology-induced anxiety and achieve a ‘tech-nature balance’ through practical experiments designed to enhance our digital lives indoors, outdoors and online. A word of warning though: Technobiophilia draws upon research from numerous disciplines because that is the only way to expose previously undiscovered synergies. As a result, every reader will probably encounter unfamiliar territory at some point such as words and concepts which may feel impenetrable or irrelevant to their own experience. When this happens, do not feel guilty about skipping a page or two. You will most likely return to that spot more confidently later on as the jigsaw comes together. Why persevere? Because you will encounter illuminating surprises which are of critical importance in a world where we spend less and less time outdoors. This book does not counsel you to turn your back on either nature or the machine, but shows how the two can complement each other in very useful ways.

The start

Q:		If the internet were a landscape, what kind of landscape would it be?
A:		It would be vast and rolling across hills and valleys, with no ability to see what was over the next hill. It would be like a dense net on the landscape with creatures and beings that ebb and flow and interact with humans as they journey across it.

LEONARD KLEINROCK, one of the founding fathers of the internet⁶

In 2004, I started collecting examples of nature metaphors used in relation to computers and cyberspace. I soon had a list which included bug, cloud, mouse, river, root, spider, stream, surf, swarm, tail, trail, tree, virus, web, worm and many other terms. Intrigued, I took my research a step further and asked people ‘if the internet were a landscape, what kind of landscape would it be?’ Sometimes the response was a blank dismissal, but more often it elicited an immediate reply, as if a cyber-landscape were already lodged in that person’s imagination and just waiting to be conjured up. The landscape of the internet was like a sky, I was told. A park. A jungle. An ocean. A rubbish dump. An entire world. I began to feel like an amateur psychologist excavating the unconscious minds of internet users. These images seemed to be surfacing from an atavistic sensibility so deeply buried that we do not even realize we are expressing it. Something was going on. But I had no idea what it was or why it was happening.

Then I was introduced to the work of linguist George Lakoff and philosopher Mark Johnson. In Metaphors We Live By they explain how when we come across something new we try to understand it by likening it to something else which seems to have similar qualities. ‘The essence of metaphor,’ they say, lies in ‘understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another’.⁷ And once a new metaphor has been created, its very existence reconfigures the world as we know it. ‘New metaphors’, say Lakoff and Johnson, ‘have the power to create a new reality’.⁸ Until recently, for example, a cloud was a visible mass of condensed water gliding above us in the sky that sometimes turns into rain. Today it is still that, but now we also imagine it as an invisible clump of data floating over us somewhere up there. In fact, ‘the cloud’ is a network of very earth-based computers connected together to deliver high levels of storage and computing power. ‘The metaphor of “the cloud”’, writes author Nicholas Carr, ‘seems to have been derived from those schematic drawings of corporate computing systems that use stylized images of clouds to represent the Internet – that vast, ill-defined digital mass that lies beyond the firewall’.⁹ They remind him of ‘the ancient maps of the known world, the edges of which were marked with the legend “Beyond Here There Be Dragons”’.¹⁰ Philosopher Gaston Bachelard, writing only of meteorological clouds, provides a different but still relevant interpretation: ‘clouds help us dream of transformation,’ he writes. They offer ‘a reverie without responsibility’.¹¹

A while ago I was struck by a remark from the writer Noah Richler on a BBC World Service radio programme. He said ‘The first task of story is to name things’¹² and described the way that our brains structure our experiences into stories as a matter of course. They begin with lists of what happened, he said, such as ‘in Tony’s restaurant you ate a pizza and had a glass of wine and your friend told you he had cancer. Then your brain sorts out the important elements of that list’.¹³ This seems a useful model to help sort out the way we try to make sense of cyberspace. For example, the brain might say ‘this place is new to me but it resembles something I know about – the living world – so I am going to give it the same kinds of names. So even though I don’t have any personal experience of surfing this experience matches the data I have already collected about surfing so I am happy to go with that metaphor.’ In other words, every individual has a personalized experience and level of skill, and we all interpret the internet differently, but many of us adopt popular memes which seem to connect with recognizable experiences. It is because of this process that a concept like ‘surfing the web’ became one of many memes to arise in cyberculture.

The notion of memes was introduced by English evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in 1976 to stand for ‘tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches’.¹⁴ He explained that ‘Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain.’¹⁵ Memes can arise overnight and disappear almost as quickly; they are a powerful, unpredictable and uncontrollable form of cultural transmission. But not everyone feels comfortable with Dawkins’ classification. For philosopher Mary Midgley, for example, ‘The trouble is that thought and culture are not the sort of thing that can have distinct units.’¹⁶ However, in some case cyberculture can indeed generate distinct units in the form of hashtags and keywords, and many of them form an essential part of the online environment as it constantly refreshes itself with neologisms which may explain why the notion of internet memes has been widely accepted despite objections to the more general provenance of the term.

Nature writer Richard Mabey believes that the natural world helps to make sense of our everyday experiences by furnishing us with a set of concepts with which to interpret them. ‘Despite our science and our humanism’, he writes, ‘our whole culture is infused with myths and symbols of landscape and nature, emblems of the seasons, of decay and rebirth, of the boundaries between the wild and the tame, myths of migration and transmigration, of invisible monsters and lands of lost content.’¹⁷ Do these cultural infusions help us deal with the new and unfamiliar world of cyberspace by providing a transcendental passage between different kinds of materialities? Perhaps. Such crossover of meaning is certainly symptomatic of transliteracy, a process which is characterized by the melding of literacies between different modes and which lends itself well to the transposition of one materiality, nature, into another, cyberspace. Indeed, as soon as speech and grammar were developed, perhaps even before then, the ability to process a fact or event into transferable information has been key to cultural advancement. Marshall McLuhan believed that the spoken word was actually a technology in itself, one by which ‘man was able to let go of his environment in order to grasp it in a new way’.¹⁸ From gestures of body language and images scratched in earth or on stone, through speech, singing, painting, writing, music making and mathematics, to mechanical and electronic reproductions in audio and moving image, the twin capacities of being able to comprehend a story within the usual conventions of beginning, middle and end, and the ability to use these same conventions to in turn construct and tell a story, are among the most fundamental of human literacies. Without them we would not be able to make sense of what we learn, nor pass it on in a useful form. When my colleagues and I developed the concept of transliteracy in 2006 we focused on the processes of reading, writing and interaction, but it can equally be applied to phenomenological experiences such as those described in this book.

At this point and before going any further, I should like to clarify some of the terms used in the pages ahead. Many people are unaware that cyberspace, the web and the internet are very different entities, so here is a brief explanation of each of them.

The internet is hardware, a tangible collection of the wires, machines and satellite signals which make up the physical body of cyberspace. The early internet was originally called Arpanet and it began as a network of computer nodes linked together first across the United States then gradually across the world, like a series of connected telephone exchanges allowing the transfer of text and data....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 A place so new that some things still lack names
• 2 How nature soothes our connected minds
• 3 Cybernetic meadows: The California connection
• 4 An enormous, unbounded world
• 5 Organisms
• 6 Living deliberately
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index