IN THE BUBBLE JOHN THACKARA - witz cultural

Table 3.1
Information flow in sensory systems and conscious perception
Sensory
system
Total
bandwidth (bits/s)
Eyes 10,000,000 40
Ears 100,000 30
Skin 1,000,000 5
Taste 1,000 1
Smell 100,000 1
Conscious
bandwidth (bits/s)
Mobility 63
Source: Tor Norretranders, The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size (New
York: Viking, 1998).
Norretranders, are designed for a much richer existence than processing a
dribble of data from a computer screen. There is far too little information,
he concludes, in the so-called information age. 34 ‘‘Consciousness is our
shallowest sensation,’’ concurs the philosopher John Gray. ‘‘Being embodied
is our nature as earth-born creatures.’’ 35 The danger in our infatuation
with digital communication is that we feel compelled to reduce all
human knowledge and experience to symbolic form. As a result, we undervalue
the knowledge and experience that we have by virtue of having
bodies. Hubert Dreyfus, another philosopher, puts it more poetically: ‘‘Telepresence
is an oxymoron. Tele-hugs won’t do it.’’ 36 When we persist in trying
to substitute virtual experiences for embodied ones, we end up with the
worst of both worlds. Digitization speeds the flow of data, but impoverishes
our lived experience.
Face-to-face communication is not the only type of communication that
counts. The telephone, after all, is a form of virtual realty—and it’s a powerful
medium that delivers a satisfactory sense of connection to billions of
people everyday: POTS, they call it in the trade—or ‘‘plain old telephone
service’’—and POTS has been a workable mobility substitute for three generations
now. But like the Internet, although it substitutes for some mobility,
it stimulates a lot more.
There are more interesting tasks for design than the use of brute bandwidth
to achieve ‘‘being there’’ verisimilitude. The communication quality
of cyberspace can be enhanced by artful and indirect means. In a project
called The Poetics of Telepresence, British designers Tony Dunne and Fiona
Raby looked at the potential fusing of physical and telematic space. They