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Technologically Mediated Identity: Personal Computers, Online Aliases, and Japanese Robots

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Reconstructing Identity

Abstract

Pasfield-Neofitou argues that relationships between technology and identity are multifaceted and complex. Computers have long been used as a metaphor for explaining the human mind and aspects of our identities; likewise, the mind has been utilized as a metaphor to explain the processes of computers. Such interplay is evident throughout our language: we speak of computers having memory, describe ourselves as pinging one another, multitasking, and having fried our brains after a long study session. While we have utilized the human body as a template for understanding the world around us throughout history, the machine has become a metaphor for just about anything in modern society, with ourselves simultaneously the most familiar, and the most unknowable, feature of our world.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    On Wikipedia, identity has over 50 entries. Aside from the music, film, and television episodes, most entries are listed under computer science. Crowdsourced resources like Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity) and Urban Dictionary (http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Identity) constitute important online sites for (re)construction where users contribute, collaboratively edit, or even vote on definitions.

  2. 2.

    The 1950s discovery of DNA was believed to have revealed the “ultimate truth” of the body in the form of information (Black 2014, 117). Kay describes the informatic account of genetics, which introduced communication science terms such as “information”, “code”, “text”, and “program” to molecular biology, as “a metaphor of a metaphor” (1997, 28, cited in Black 2014, 117).

  3. 3.

    Crowther-Heyck (1999) gives three reasons the computer metaphor was interpreted as anti-behaviorist: first, it was connected to a Chomskyan approach to linguistics that saw mind as necessary to explain human language; second, it was associated with an interdisciplinary approach; and finally, it entailed the adoption of a new research paradigm, replacing the laboratory rat with the human-computer system.

  4. 4.

    Citing Turner (2006), Pegrum maintains that today’s personal, networked computing is not a revival of countercultural dreams of “empowered individualism, collaborative community, and spiritual communion” but evidence of the computer’s 1960s roots (2009, 14).

  5. 5.

    Fei Fei Li’s TED talk (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40riCqvRoMs) is just one example. Many such projects have been concerned with language learning. SimSimi (derived from the Korean for “bored”) http://www.simsimi.com/ is a conversation program available as an iPhone/Android app that allows users to teach it new phrases when it does not know how to respond. A search for “chat bot” will yield many other examples.

  6. 6.

    Television shows such as Humans and the Japanese drama Zettai Kareshi are examples of this.

  7. 7.

    As Black (2014, citing Babbage 1994) describes, visitors found another of Babbage’s machines, a mechanical Silver Lady dancer, more appealing than his Difference Engine, a disembodied mathematical “ brain”.

  8. 8.

    The 1950s Cognitive Revolution involved interchange between linguistics, psychology, anthropology, and artificial intelligence (AI), computer science, and neuroscience, prioritizing information, computation, and feedback, positing programs in the mind, mental mechanisms, and viewing the mind as a complex system rather than deriving from a blank state (Pinker 2002).

  9. 9.

    See for example the Turing Test (Turing 1950), generally understood as requiring that a computer be able to imitate a human. In 1966, Weizenbaum created the program ELIZA which appeared to pass this test, although the measure is highly dependent on attitudes and expertise of the human user (see below in the section “The Robot as Other” for a discussion of complicity). Searle’s (1980) similarly controversial “Chinese Room” thought experiment, in which it is shown how someone (or a computer) could translate Chinese without understanding the language, posits that Turing’s test could not prove whether a machine could think. A recent TEDxYouth talk by Oscar Schwartz (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Possj5cXEnM) explored this question in relation to computer-written poetry . The term “Reverse Turing Test” is often used in relation to tasks like CAPTCHA, designed to distinguish real human users from bots on websites.

  10. 10.

    Turkle points out that a model of mind as multiprocessor leaves one with a “decentralized” self, with no “I” or “me”. “But theories that deny and decentre the ‘I’ challenge most people’s day-to-day experience of having one. The assumption that there is an ‘I’ is solidly built into ordinary language” (1984, 302). This is particularly true of a language such as English, in which it is practically impossible to construct subjectless sentences, but in languages like Japanese, avoidance of pronouns is common, and verbs are not inflected for gender/number, for example konpyūtā o tsukau could equally mean “(I) use (a) computer(s)”, “((s)he) uses (a) computer(s)”, “(they) use (a) computer(s)” or “(we) use (a) computer(s)”, depending on context.

  11. 11.

    Formerly “Man of the Year”, four women received the honor before the change in name to “Person”, and none, aside from joint awards, have since.

  12. 12.

    Launched in 2005 under the slogan “Broadcast Yourself” and sold to Google a year later, YouTube has attracted considerable academic attention, including research on identity construction (see Lange 2007), as a space for individuals to “represent their identities and perspectives, engage with the self-representations of others, and encounter cultural difference” (Bou-Franch et al. 2012, 81). The name YouTube itself is just one of a slew of names that foreground the user, including MySpace. The Nintendo Wii, for example, sounds like “we”, and graphically, the two ii’s represent two people standing together. “i” has been used as in prefix for a variety of Internet-related names, including iVillage (an online community for women as early as 1994, see Benton 2010), and the BBC’s iPlayer, and is especially well-known in iPod, iPad, and other Apple products. Although standing for “Internet”, jokes at teenagerposts.tumblr.com show that the prefix can be conceived of as standing for the individual: “It’s an iPod NOT an usPod” (#918).

  13. 13.

    “Digital Natives ” are those who grew up with the Internet (Prensky 2001). Although the term is widely used, the generation it refers to varies (generally cited as those born after 1980, see Palfrey and Gasser 2008), and distinctions are blurred. Prensky now appears to favor “digital wisdom”.

  14. 14.

    Quote from elementary student Deborah that inspired the title of The Second Self (cited in Turkle 2004, 1).

  15. 15.

    Albeit a later port of the “computer psychologist” program to Amiga. A version of the program is available online at http://psych.fullerton.edu/mbirnbaum/psych101/Eliza.htm

  16. 16.

    Examples from http://www.buzzfeed.com/ariellecalderon/things-to-ask-siri-when-youre-bored?utm_term=.yf6JaDKZE#.em7NWwjg2Z. Siri & Me: A modern love story by Milgrim (2012), which tells the tale of a love triangle between a man, a woman, and Siri , also contains many such exchanges. The protagonist writes on his blog, “with some luck, it won’t be long now before we’ll be able to digitize the contents of our own brains and then upload our very selves into cyberspace ” (n.p.) comparable to the brain-porting concept mentioned in f.n. 25 below, and at the peak of the narrative, declares “I was overloaded. My chips were fried. My hard drive was crashing.” Clearly, such notions remain part of the popular conscious.

  17. 17.

    A follow-up article by Zhang (2015) explores some of the technical and social hypotheses for this trend. The protagonist of Siri & Me mentioned above comments:

    I want to take a moment to step back and reflect on the general experience of living with ‘her’ these last months. I know that ‘she’ is nothing more than clever programming, but there’s a part of me that can’t help being fooled … She seems real. When it comes down to it, who’s to say she isn’t? After all, if texting, e-mailing, and surfing the Web aren’t the telltale signs of life, what are?” (Milgrim 2012, n.p.)

    Note how quickly the protagonist moves from enclosing “she” and “her” in quotation marks to using these terms unmarked.

  18. 18.

    It is worth noting that not only digital products are treated in this way—drawing inspiration from digital rights management (DRM) a DRM Chair was constructed at the University of Art and Design in Lausanne intentionally designed to self-destruct after eight uses (see http://hackaday.com/2013/03/04/drm-chair-only-works-8-times/). In another example of producers seeking to control products after purchase, The Times reported on a reading ban on copies of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince accidentally sold early: an injunction was granted “prohibiting the buyers from even reading their copies before the publication date”, the author’s legal advisors saying “that the author was entitled to prevent buyers from reading their own books even though they had not broken the law” (See Malvern 2005).

  19. 19.

    Although initiatives such as https://www.codecademy.com/, founded in 2011, are now partnering with schools to teach programming.

  20. 20.

    Some of the commercials compared specific versions of Microsoft Windows to Mac’s iOS; however, it is important to note that while the two are often conflated, not all PCs run Windows. It is also interesting to note how pronoun usage in, for example, Microsoft Office dialog boxes, has changed over time, encouraging greater identification with the computer. When using the find and replace function in the preparation of this chapter, Word reported “All done. We made 2 replacements” while previous versions would report “Word has completed its search of the document and has made 2 replacements” (this is author’s emphasis), encouraging a more colloquial, collaborative, and personal relationship with the computer.

  21. 21.

    McPherson (2012) has also noted parallels between cultural and computational OSs, and Nakamura (2008) too, notes that the key years in the development of the Internet coincided with a pivotal moment in American political “nineties neoliberalism”, sparking debate over whether the Internet might be the revolution in communication and human consciousness it was trumpeted as.

  22. 22.

    Technology advertisements for a mainstream market appear to have changed somewhat; however, components such as graphics cards still frequently depict highly sexualized, computer-generated images of women or “female ” cyborgs.

  23. 23.

    Examples taken from images archived at: http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/vintage-tech-ads/ and www.buzzfeed.com/mjs538/85-funny-andor-ridiculous-vintage-computer-ads.

  24. 24.

    Two ads neatly bookend the human experience: an Atari ad labeled “Planned Parenthood” states “Bringing an ATARI Home Computer into your life can provide its own special rewards. For example … you can quickly calculate the impact of any newcomer on your financial future … over the years, you’ll be amazed at how much an ATARI Home Computer will become a part of your family’s life. And, how much your family will grow with it”. “Now one of your mechanic’s tools is another man’s mind” claims a GM advertisement, “we have begun to program human knowledge—and logic—into a computer. It’s called artificial intelligence. So, even when an engine expert retires from GM, his mind can still work for you. His lifetime of experience can go into a computer”, similar to the notion of brain-porting that Kurzweil (1999, 128) refers to.

  25. 25.

    A 2011 song Threw it on the Ground by The Lonely Island satirises our use of such conflationary language.

  26. 26.

    It is interesting to note that a number of devices in addition to the Palm have names that make specific reference to the part of the body or function of the self they extend: thumb drives, laptops, hand phones, and ThinkPad are other examples.

  27. 27.

    Discussion group participant cited in Turkle (1995, 256).

  28. 28.

    Black also points out that “Turkle’s claims were based on the discussion of practices like cybersex or gender performance” stating “it is hard to understand what either sexual pleasure or desire, or the attribution of gender, could mean without recourse to a physical body” (2014, 109–110).

  29. 29.

    White (2004) inverted this phrase in her essay On the Internet, Everybody Worries That You’re a Dog: The Gender Expectations and Beauty Ideals of Online Personals and Text-Based Chat.

  30. 30.

    http://www.theguardian.com/education/ng-interactive/2015/may/28/language-barrier-internet-experience provides a visualization of how the language(s) you understand can change how you experience the Internet.

  31. 31.

    Although, as mentioned above, it no longer appears to be the case that the majority of Internet users are “western”. http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm reports that more than 45 percent of Internet users are located in Asia, as of December 2014, with Europe and North America accounting for only 29 percent. The next largest groups of users are Latin America/Caribbean with approximately 10 percent each, and the Middle East and Oceania/Australia account for just 3.7 percent and 0.9 percent respectively.

  32. 32.

    World of Warcraft (http://us.battle.net/wow/en/), where players join a “race” from one of the warring factions of Azeroth, the Alliance or the Horde, is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, and Starcraft (http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/), where players choose between human, psychic, and insectoid “races” to battle, is a real-time strategy game. Both, to some extent, draw upon a pre-existing tradition of games (including tabletop and role-playing games) and science-fiction and fantasy tropes. The use of terms such as “race” may be a legacy of these traditions.

  33. 33.

    Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selfie) states that photos in the selfie genre existed long before the term gained popularity, and displays the “first known selfie” taken by photography pioneer Robert Cornelius in 1839, as well as a photo of a woman taking her picture in the mirror c. 1900.

  34. 34.

    http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2013/11/word-of-the-year-2013-winner/ Selfie also made Barret’s list of words of the year in 2013 in the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/22/opinion/sunday/a-wordnado-of-words-in-2013.html?_r=0), and was shortlisted by the American Dialect Society. The earliest recorded usage of selfie has been identified on an Australian ABC Online forum positing in 2002. (Perhaps unsurprising, given Australians’ predilection for hypocorisms involving reduction and addition of -y or -ie as in footy or Aussie). Popular coinages include helfie (hair selfie), legsie (leg selfie), and shelfie (shelf photo), and Bloomberg reports groufie (a portmanteau of group + selfie) has been trademarked by phone manufacturer, Huawei (Bershidsky 2014). Samsung, meanwhile, is using wefie for wide-angle group selfies (Swamy 2014).

    The winner and runner up were dance-move twerk, and interestingly, hashtag, which the magazine clarifies as “a vote for the word, not the symbol, particularly when used to faux-label live, face-to-face conversation” (Steinmetz 2013). Unfortunately for those plumping for the demise of selfie, in 2014, not only was the word officially accepted for use in Scrabble, but ABC in the US began airing a series named Selfie, largely patterned on Pygmalion/My Fair Lady, concerned with protagonist Eliza Dooley’s narcissistic use of social media, and The Chainsmokers released a song titled #SELFIE (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdemFfbS5H0). A year later, Selfie Le Le Re was released as part of the soundtrack to the 2015 Indian film Bajrangi Bhaijaan (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TITGBTGJZS8).

  35. 35.

    https://twitter.com/TheEllenShow/statuses/440322224407314432.

  36. 36.

    http://www.australia.com/ja-jp/campaigns/gigaselfie.html.

  37. 37.

    At the time of writing, the unauthorized use of “selfies” by those wanting to pose as pregnant women in order to deceive other women and obtain photos from them provides one example of this loss of control (see http://www.essentialbaby.com.au/pregnancy/stages-of-pregnancy/preggophile-groups-stealing-womens-bump-photos-20150818-gj1jil.html).

  38. 38.

    Turkle (1995) notes that the term “cyberspace” grew out of science fiction.

  39. 39.

    The term “virtual” is far more popular than any of the above terms, particularly used now in relation to hardware equipment such as helmets or goggles, suits, and gloves, such as the Oculus Rift. “IRL” (in real life) is another popular acronym online. It is noteworthy that the protagonist in Milgrim’s (2012) graphic novel ends up choosing the human , Iris (a palindrome for “ Siri”), concluding “There is something about real people in love. There is something, well, real about it … It’s not perfect, but, at least for now, it beats the electronic alternatives”.

  40. 40.

    In another example of online and offline convergence, it appears ESPN announced a move into eSports (LeJacq 2015).

  41. 41.

    Laugh Out Loud, originally used to denote laughter in written communication, is now used as a phatic device and even verbalized in spoken communication (similar to “hashtag” as noted above) to express mild entertainment where laughter is deemed unwarranted.

  42. 42.

    http://web.archive.org/web/20071119125318/http://www.bandai.co.jp/kids/tm/tamago/tamago_01.html. “Tamago” (たまご) is Japanese for egg. In Japanese orthography, all words end with either vowel or an ‘n’, hence the transliteration of ‘watch’ as ‘wotchi’. Tamagotchi (たまごっち) is occasionally written ‘Tamagotch’.

  43. 43.

    On Takara-Tomy’s website “a mind of its own” is translated into Japanese as “kokoro wo motta kawaii tomodachi” [a cute friend with a mind/heart/spirit [of its own]]. In a 1999 tongue-in-cheek Guardian article, Borger reported that Furbies had been banned from the National Security Agency owing to inflated claims of their ability to “learn”/“record” language.

  44. 44.

    Electrically Erasable Programmable Read-Only Memory (EEPROM) is used to store small amounts of data when power is removed. Quote from http://www.instructables.com/id/Furby-Brain-Surgery/step7/Furby-Board-Anatomy/ Interestingly, “Furby Hacking” has become a niche hobby.

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  1. Adjunct Research Fellow, Monash University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

    Sarah Pasfield-Neofitou

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  1. Sarah Pasfield-Neofitou
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Correspondence to Sarah Pasfield-Neofitou .

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  1. IATL, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK

    Nicholas Monk

  2. Faculty of Arts, Monash University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

    Mia Lindgren

  3. Faculty of Arts, Monash University, Clayton, Victoria, Australia

    Sarah McDonald  & Sarah Pasfield-Neofitou  & 

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Pasfield-Neofitou, S. (2017). Technologically Mediated Identity: Personal Computers, Online Aliases, and Japanese Robots. In: Monk, N., Lindgren, M., McDonald, S., Pasfield-Neofitou, S. (eds) Reconstructing Identity. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58427-0_10

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