[with audio] Technobiophilia: Sue Thomas, The Future of Cyberspace, Professorial Lecture, De...
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The Future of Cyberspace Professor Sue Thomas Professorial Lecture, De Montfort University, 26 April 2012 www.technobiophilia. com @suethomas #technobiophilia
[with audio] Technobiophilia: Sue Thomas, The Future of Cyberspace, Professorial Lecture, De Montfort University, 26 April 2012
NB: YOU NEED TO DOWNLOAD THESE SLIDES TO HEAR THE SOUND The act of entering cyberspace was, along with the entering of outer space, one of the most profound experiences of the twentieth century. In 1969, humans landed first ‘on’ the moon (July), and then ‘in’ cyberspace (September) with the connection of the first two nodes of the internet. Today the mountains of the Moon remain neglected and unexplored, but cyberspace has evolved into a deeply familiar habitat whose geography has been shaped by those who built and used it. This talk explores the evolution of the landscape of cyberspace from its creation as an unpopulated wilderness through its exploration, colonisation, cultivation, settlement and growth, and offers some predictions for the future of this most exotic place. Sue Thomas is Professor of New Media at the Institute of Creative Technologies in the Faculty of Art, Design and Humanities. She has written several books including the novel 'Correspondence', short-listed for the 1992 Arthur C Clarke Award for Best Science Fiction Novel, and most recently the 2004 non-fiction cyberspace travelogue 'Hello World: travels in virtuality'. She has written about computers and the internet since the 1980s and is now working on 'Nature and Cyberspace: Stories, Memes and Metaphors', a study of the relationships between cyberspace and the natural world, forthcoming with Bloomsbury Academic. She co-directs the influential Transliteracy Research Group and the DMU Transdisciplinary Group, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. www.technobiophilia.com
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1. The Future of Cyberspace www.technobiophilia.com @suethomas
Professor Sue Thomas Professorial Lecture, De Montfort University,
26 April 2012 #technobiophilia
2. What is this place?
3. Electricity Is it a fact -- or have I dreamt it -- that, by
means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve,
vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of
time?(Nathaniel Hawthorne,The House of Seven Gables. 1851)
4. The Domain of Cyberspace Internet of Things 1999 Materiality
World Wide Web 1984 Software Arpanet/Internet 1969 Hardware
5. The Internet of Things
6. Ninja block
7. Going organic
8. lo
9. Biophilia The innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike
processes Edward O Wilson 1984
10. Cyberspace A consensual hallucination... Unthinkable
complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind,
clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding...
Gibson 1984
11. Terrain
12. FrontierYour legal concepts of property, expression, i
dentity, movement, an d context do not apply to us. They are all
based on matter, and there is no matter here. Barlow 1996
13. FarmingTopsoil grows at a rate of an inch every 100 years.
You can grow fabulous plants quickly in that soil, but the soil
itself is a product of slow time. OReilly 2000
14. Bugsthe wolf spider is active at night and catches its prey
by pursuit rather than by creating a web and waiting. The Lycos
search engine emulates this by skipping from server to server
gathering documents as it goes.
21. Directed Attention Without directed attention you may be
rash, uncooperative and less competent But too much directed
attention leads to DAF Directed Attention Fatigue. Symptoms include
aggression, intolerance, and insensitivity to social cues. Such
people have also been found to be less likely to help someone in
need.
22. Resting Directed Attention Increasing specialisation has
meant that each of us spends longer hours pursuing a single
activity, as opposed to the variety of tasks pursued by our
ancestors. Such persistence requires discipline, which depends
heavily on directed attention. The solution is to find ways to rest
your directed attention with the use of restorative settings
23. Nearby Naturepromises a continuation of the world beyond
what is immediately perceived
24. Nearby Nature Screensavers?
25. Being Awayin which the setting is physically or
conceptually different from ones usual environment
26. Soft FascinationA setting which evokes mental processes
which engage attention effortlessly but still leave room for
reflection
27. Drifting in the stream
28. Interval Shifts
29. So where are we? We (unconsciously) brought nature into
cyberspace as it evolved The reason may lie in biophilia Biophilia
seems to influence the way we inhabit cyberspace. It makes us feel
more comfortable. In a technological environment, this could be
reshaped as technobiophilia
30. Technobiophilia (2013) The innate tendency to focus on life
and lifelike processes as they appear in technology
31. So what lies ahead?
32. Bionanoprotonics?Digital devices from bacteria & DNA
Transistors from protons
33. The Singularity?I set the date for the Singularity -
representing a profound and disruptive transformation in human
capability - as 2045. Technical progress will be so fast that
unenhanced human intelligence will be unable to follow it
Kurzweil2005
34. Gaia? It may be that one role we play is as the senses and
nervous system for Gaia. The earth is more than just a home, its a
living system and we are part of it. James Lovelock
35. Hylozoic Architecture
36. The Future of Cyberspace www.technobiophilia.com @suethomas
Professor Sue Thomas Professorial Lecture, De Montfort University,
26 April 2012 #technobiophilia
37. Links from the talk The Internet of Things IBM
http://youtu.be/sfEbMV295Kk Ninja Blocks http://ninjablocks.com/
Biophilia, Bjork, promo video http://youtu.be/o8AELvVUFLw iPhone
app: http://bitly.com/biophiliaapp Net Smart, 2012, Rheingold, H.
http://rheingold.com/netsmart/ Book: http://amzn.to/JvxufB
Scientists create computing building blocks from bacteria and DNA,
Imperial College News Release, 18 Oct 2011 http://bit.ly/JvxH2e
Breakthrough: proton-based chips that communicate directly with
living things, Angelica, A., Kurzweil Blog, 21 Sept 2011
http://bit.ly/JvxOuJ Hylozoic Ground at the Venice Biennale 2010,
Philip Beesley http://youtu.be/v86B9Nz_LVU
38. Sample Biophilia BibliographyIve found the following
helpful in beginning to understand biophilia: Kaplan, R., &
Kaplan, S. (1989). The Experience of Nature. New York: Cambridge
University Press. Kellert, S. R., Heerwagen, J. H., & Mador, M.
L. (2008). Biophilic Design. Hoboken: John Wiley. Kellert, S. R.,
& Wilson, E. O. (1993). The Biophilia Hypothesis. Washington
DC: Island Press. Orians, G. (1986). An ecological and evolutionary
approach to landscape aesthetics. In E. Penning-Rowsell, & D.
Lowenthal, Landscape meanings and values (pp. 3-22). London: Allen
& Unwin. Ullrich, R. (1984). View through a window may
influence recovery from surgery. Science 27 April Vol. 224 no. 4647
, 420-421. Wilson, E. O. (1984). Biophilia. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press