21 April 2010

The Space between People

Source picture from Penny-Arcade, full comic can be found here.

Perhaps my friend The Pendant can illuminate me, but an interesting article popped up on "City of Ontario v. Quon" and how this reveals a bit on our Supreme Court Justices' grasp of technology.

Take for example this juicy bit I pulled from the transcript on establishing reasonable expectation of privacy.

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Again, it depends upon their reasonable expectation. Do any of these other people know about Arch Wireless? Don't they just assume that once they send something to Quon, it's going to Quon?

MR. DAMMEIER: That's -- that is true. I mean, they expect -

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Well, then they can't have a reasonable expectation of privacy based on the fact that their communication is routed through a communications company.

MR. DAMMEIER: Well, they -- they expect that some company, I'm sure, is going to have to be processing the delivery of this message. And -

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Well, I didn't -- I wouldn't think that. I thought, you know, you push a button; it goes right to the other thing.

MR. DAMMEIER: Well -

JUSTICE SCALIA: You mean it doesn't go right to the other thing?

(Laughter.)


I imagine the laughter was do to the sarcasm of Justice Scalia and not at the expense of either Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Scalia. I also don't mean to make fun of them, being that this is an important point of contention which has no easy answers with technology. What do we expect to be private, and should we trust such expectations? This blog isn't private, and I am aware that I'm pushing this out there in the public sphere, but many feel that text messages and e-mails are private, but they are barely encoded and run on the same public communication lines. Many computer and mobile phone users don't take the time to think of these things despite their familiarity with interfacing with it. It may seem funny to us, but these particularities are hardly addressed but really should be.

Now that people are getting over the hoopla of the iPad, I remember that I had a tablet PC with a touch screen back in 2006, and it was great. I really loved the thing, it did everything the iPad does now, but had a physical keyboard, a camera and USB and SD card slots. It even had little metal legs in the back that folded out and created it's own stand. So when I got my new netbook for school I left behind the PepperPad back in my parent's home. I figured I could mod it or use it for parts some time in the future. The thing is, since it was so user friendly, I could set it up as a really good e-mail machine for my mom. She doesn't have an e-mail address yet, but she owns her own business and I figured she might like one. So I asked her if she'd like for me to teach her how to use the Pepper Pad to check e-mail she responded with...
No that's okay, I like talking to real people, I don't want to talk to a robot.
I understand that she didn't mean that literally, but I wonder if she feels the same way about talking on her mobile phone, or any phone for that matter. In a sense, she's quite right, most of my generation doesn't feel that way and are perfectly comfortable with the idea that we're communicating through technology and that on either end of all this technology is a real human being. However, without this imaginative leap, we are still interfacing at an inanimate object.

Someone once told me that any technology created before we were born is perfectly natural; any technology made before we were 20 is new and exciting; and any technology made after 40 is dangerous magic. Young or old, there are many assumptions and ideas which we take for granted. I take for granted that when I call someone on my mobile phone, the person on the other end is real, and that no one is making the effort to tap into my wireless signal. Is this the natural order of things? Will I be calling my daughter about IT support to fuse with the core mind? At what point will I myself start saying that this particular use of technology has distance us too far from human interaction.

1 comment:

The Technicolor Panda said...

Indirect means of communication are also the fastest growing. I'm not sure that it's a bad thing, but at the very least, it's a very prominent fact. Cell phones used to be just phones - now I use mine to send texts and email more often than I use it to actually call someone. With indirect communication comes more barriers and instability, namely the idea of someone tapping into the channels that messages go through.

You make a very good point, though. In essence, when we pick up our phones, we're interacting with the phone, not the person on the other end of the line. Any hand gesture or facial expression that I make is completely lost on the phone, but the "imaginative leap" I take when I hit CALL makes me forget that. Perhaps especially now that video calls have become popular options for communication, it's easy to forget that there's a barrier between you and the person you're speaking to - which is what I imagine technological advancements are trying to do. Barriers like static and dropped calls make indirect means of communication look indirect, which is not ideal for the face of technology itself.