IN THE BUBBLE JOHN THACKARA - witz cultural

Literacy 171
‘‘external’’ to the subject. ‘‘The body is our general medium for having a
world; sight and movement are specific ways of entering into relationships
with objects,’’ he wrote. 27 For Merleau-Ponty and other critics of visuality
as a privileged medium of understanding, it is meaningless to talk about
perceptual processes of seeing without reference to all the senses, to the
total physical environment in which the body is situated. 28 Merleau-Ponty
memorably counseled us to ‘‘move beyond high altitude thinking . . .
towards a closer engagement with the world made flesh.’’ 29
Designers struggling to improve the usability of computer systems have
learned the hard way about the limits to disembodied visual information.
‘‘Understanding is not only embodied, it is also situated,’’ says anthropologist
Lucy Suchman, who wrote a classic text on the subject. Suchman has
spent her career trying to persuade senior managers and computer scientists
that ‘‘human activity is not primarily as rational, planned and controlled
as we like to think. It is better described as situated, social, and in
direct response to the physical and social environment.’’ Meaning is always
created in a situation, continues Suchman; ‘‘ordinary interpersonal interaction
is far more complex than the constrained and choreographed interactions
enabled by computers.’’ 30 The problem for Suchman and her design
colleagues is that their bosses and clients remain in thrall to technologybased
notions such as ‘‘context independence’’ and ‘‘anytime, anywhere
functionality’’—a beguiling litany now augmented by the 3D Visible Enterprise
I mentioned earlier in the chapter. These are catchy sales slogans, but
misleading and irresponsible descriptions of how computers and people
interact.
In reaction to the limited bandwidth of technology-enhanced vision,
ecological thinkers emphasize that our senses—taste, smell, sight, hearing,
touch—are the fundamental avenues of connection between the self and
the world. 31 Luis Fernández-Galiano, in a remarkable book called Fire and
Memory, argues that we need to shift our perceptions ‘‘from the eye to the
skin—to develop not just an understanding, but a feeling of how complex
urban flows and processes work.’’ 32 When I met him at a 2002 Doors of
Perception conference in Amsterdam, Fernández-Galiano elaborated that
‘‘we need sensual, not just visual, seismographs.’’
The Internet, especially when coupled with sensors and telerobotic
devices, potentially enables us to observe and even act on distant objects.
But do these techniques provide us with meaningful knowledge? This is