As we move into naturalizing culture, we begin to embody the symbolic products of our artifacts. The cognitive procedures we engage with tools are becoming to be seen as a form of communication. The language of human computer interaction is the interface, the grammar we observe, however, is the identity of the user. So the hammer to get a name like John is to make it more about what it is happening between human beings. It is a dialogue. So many instruments, tools and objects got this characteristic that we live surrounded by brands. From the cool laid products to car designs, to project animacy onto matter to get it embodied back is what gives-us the sense of culture.
When small, old, traditional societies like indigenous peoples, or farmers, hunters-gathers know sophisticated practice by keeping sharing what they know for long periods of time, we start to see the dynamical sedimentation of behavior. Such behavior is basically produced by the ways of trial and error the predecessors did. Then later it becomes tacit knowledge, information about living: maps, sayings, receipts, mesures, laws, poetry…
The material body of symbolic knowledge is now under software. We live a time where the majority of accumulated knowledge comes from, and it is reproduced by computers. So many tribes have digital technologies incorporated into their lives, even in spite of having their traditions somehow preserved. Nevertheless, they, as us, live in a dynamic relationship with way of doing everyday life things. The industrialized societies have no more the connection of the forks engravings. The observation result of centuries of seasons in a place inhabited by a group of people generates architectural solutions without digital renderings.
As in both situations, the traditional and the industrial scenarios, the objects and its technological aspects of its symbolic contents became more and more established, sedimented, it started to acquire our mental perceptions of its inner psychological characters. So the interface gains enough affordance to let the user transcend its intended functions. This dialog goes beyond the use, and it is aiming at reaffirming who uses it. So the bow of the archer is way more than artifact, is the archer itself. The same for the computer and the programmers and engineers, a dialog with themselves.
The psychological characteristics of the symbolic technologies are therefore the externalizations of unconscious behavior we have. Like eat, dress and talk, the way we see such technologies is not purely functional: a hammer is never only a hammer in the hands of a carpenter. He knows it, its strengths, its limitations. It can be coursed, praised, and by doing this, we talk with ourselves. So we are the true projections. The grammar of things is expressed in the behavior of the animalgorithms.
The code of culture is written in the fabric of the practiced realizations. Being more than just lens, it is itself the very matter of our reality. When we have such elements coming from the traditions we affirm the same practices to reaffirm us as members of the source group. When inventing new one, we express what we want from the previous expressions we learned. By contrast, when we buy something, we become, or adopt, the identity of those who designed the artifact. In both cases, the functional mode we enter, the algorithm is started and reproduces itself not as planned, but by the performance of its use.
We are a nervous system externalizing the use of things, to a point when we don’t need more of the things, materially speaking, we create them. Our mental environment is no longer natural, in the sense that we label our deep cognitive constructs into objects as accumulated knowledge. As animals, we are sociable primates who also need to engage with others of our species. And because we all are immersed in some culture, without exception, our realities are keen to those who we recognize as our group. The ethology of this situation is to acknowledge that the naturalization is 1) organized, 2) spirally cyclical and 3) unstable. Each time a body of knowledge becomes shared information it starts to gain entropy. Therefore we, as animals, behave by generating new rules, new patterns to replace the broken ones.
Now is the time of every generation. By looking back to our early ontogenetic stages we can see the algorithms being tested at a vertiginous speed. The try and error process, the sharing of produced effects is expressed in unfiltered manners. The accumulation of its process gets the name of habits, and when is thought on bigger magnitudes, common sense. Since politics governs the ethical, the aesthetically appearance of our artifact affects us morally. We can think about language as a unique tool. All other objects extracted from it, like a hammer or a number, are streams of thoughts that our cultural algorithms produce.
—
► beauty follows dignity*
Metaimagem's Blog 