Monday, September 06, 2004
Neo-Animism
When I was young, I thought that the tooth fairy worked for the government. It made sense: government workers came by in the middle of the night to take away the trash we left in the alley in back of our house; they magically repaired roads and cleaned the streets when we weren't looking; they ran my school, maintained trails through the woods, kept the streetlights working, caught criminals, and fought wars in faraway places. My dad worked for the government, as did most grown-ups I knew in Washington. We watched the fireworks (launched by the government) and listened to the band (arranged by the government) every July 4th from the White House lawn. So naturally, when I was told that someone came in the middle of the night to exchange a tooth under my pillow for a quarter, I assumed it was just part of The System. Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, too, seemed just two more civil servants keeping things running year after year. The fact that we also attended the Easter festival at the White House, complete with a costumed Easter Bunny greeting the kids, clinched it.
I did my Masters' work at the MIT Media Lab's Affective Computing Group, under Dr. Rosalind Picard. Roz's research examines the emotional dimension of human-computer interaction and computer-mediated human-to-human communication. The research relied heavily on a set of findings by Clifford Nass and Byron Reeves at Stanford, which they laid out in their book The Media Equation. Reeves and Nass make the claim that our interactions with electronic media -- notably, computers and television -- have a strong social component to them. For instance, Reeves and Nass present a study in which people were found to exhibit politeness when dealing with a computer: they were more favorable in evaluating a computer program's usefulness when talking to the computer running the program than they were when the question was asked by a different computer. In another study, the subjects reacted to the speech patterns and body language of a speaker on a television screen with appropriate social body language cues of their own: leaning back in response to expressions of anger, cocking the head to show interest, even nodding to show agreement or sympathy.
As I worked on computer applications and devices that responded to human emotional cues, I began to wonder whether a world full of affect-sensitive devices would lead to a revival of animism, the belief that objects in nature are the loci of spiritual entities. Other groups within the lab were working on camera systems that could identify and track individual faces around a room or building, autonomous software agents that performed ongoing tasks online for their human "owners", and animated virtual characters with the appearance of life and independent action. In a world where these kinds of technologies pervaded our daily lives, would it be unreasonable for a child to grow up assuming that objects in her environment would react to her presence, her moods, her requests? How is this different from my own childhood in a highly industrialized urban environment maintained by extensive social and municipal services? And how is it different from the spiritual animistic beliefs held by our ancestors for the entire length of our existence as a species? And how are these things the same?
I did my Masters' work at the MIT Media Lab's Affective Computing Group, under Dr. Rosalind Picard. Roz's research examines the emotional dimension of human-computer interaction and computer-mediated human-to-human communication. The research relied heavily on a set of findings by Clifford Nass and Byron Reeves at Stanford, which they laid out in their book The Media Equation. Reeves and Nass make the claim that our interactions with electronic media -- notably, computers and television -- have a strong social component to them. For instance, Reeves and Nass present a study in which people were found to exhibit politeness when dealing with a computer: they were more favorable in evaluating a computer program's usefulness when talking to the computer running the program than they were when the question was asked by a different computer. In another study, the subjects reacted to the speech patterns and body language of a speaker on a television screen with appropriate social body language cues of their own: leaning back in response to expressions of anger, cocking the head to show interest, even nodding to show agreement or sympathy.
As I worked on computer applications and devices that responded to human emotional cues, I began to wonder whether a world full of affect-sensitive devices would lead to a revival of animism, the belief that objects in nature are the loci of spiritual entities. Other groups within the lab were working on camera systems that could identify and track individual faces around a room or building, autonomous software agents that performed ongoing tasks online for their human "owners", and animated virtual characters with the appearance of life and independent action. In a world where these kinds of technologies pervaded our daily lives, would it be unreasonable for a child to grow up assuming that objects in her environment would react to her presence, her moods, her requests? How is this different from my own childhood in a highly industrialized urban environment maintained by extensive social and municipal services? And how is it different from the spiritual animistic beliefs held by our ancestors for the entire length of our existence as a species? And how are these things the same?
