BigShinyThing

First, a bit of background. Stay with us. It’s worth the trip.

In his magnum opus Being and Time, philosopher Martin Heidegger has a lot to say about tools. He argues that when we are actively engaged in performing a task through use of a tool, we lose consciouness of the tool itself, which, in his terminology, ‘withdraws’ into the task. The tool is only experienced as a thing-in-itself again when put down. Think of the experience of a skilled carpenter using a hammer, or a geek geeking in front of a computer. They’re not aware of the tool, they’re working at the task.

But something special happens with tools which are never put down — which, like the tool of language, are always on, always reliably available. Particularly when the task at hand isn’t something finite — such as making-a-chair, or building-a-house — but is, rather, the task of being-in-the-world. Consider the fishes of the sea:

The extraordinary efficiency of the fish as a swimming device is partly due, it now seems, to an evolved capacity to couple its swimming behaviors to the pools of external kinetic energy found as swirls, eddies and vortices in its watery environment. These vortices include both naturally occurring ones (e.g., where water hits a rock) and self-induced ones (created by well-timed tail flaps). The fish swims by building these externally occurring processes into the very heart of its locomotion routines. […]

Now consider a reliable feature of the human environment, such as the sea of words. This linguistic surround envelopes us from birth. Under such conditions, the plastic human brain will surely come to treat such structures as a reliable resource to be factored into the shaping of on-board cognitive routines.

Where the fish flaps its tail to set up the eddies and vortices it subsequently exploits, we intervene in multiple linguistic media, creating local structures and disturbances whose reliable presence drives our ongoing internal processes. Words and external symbols are thus paramount among the cognitive vortices which help constitute human thought.
[Andy Clarke & David Chalmer -- The Extended Mind ]

Or, as Clarke puts it elsewhere:

Our brains make the world smart so that we can be dumb in peace.

In essence, our brains are good at using reliably-available [that caveat is important] features of our surroundings as part of what Clarke calls the ‘extended mind’:

…you say to someone you know, do you know the time, and they say yes. And then they look at their watch. You can sort of challenge them well, did you really know the time when you said yes? They’ll say “yeah, I knew how to get the time” and I think that’s often what we do mean when we say yes, we know things, [we actually mean that] we know how to get them from our long term memory, from some reliable environmental resource, from wherever.

[Andy Clarke -- interview]

To distill further — we’re good at experiencing having-accessible as knowing — with the tools (wristwatch, language, social media) themselves no longer even experienced as being outside ourselves. See where we’re going with this? With always-on social media, we have accessible not just encyclopedic (wikipedic?) knowledge of the world, but vortices of social networks and interrelations as fluid as the ones exploited by Clarke’s theory-fish. And we’re innately equipped to utilise those networks and interrelations as part of our ‘extended mind’.

This is [part of] the argument behind our claim that these media are post-communication: they’re enablers that sit beside (not within) the idea of communication, in our box of tools-for-being-people. If true, this is a huge and humbling thing to be a part of. If wrong, looking at emergent media — in particular social media — this way, at least pins it down for long enough to probe at concepts which are otherwise, well, slippery as a fish.

Your set text for this week, should you choose to accept this mission: Clarke’s Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again.