Tools are parts of us

[palec]

I've just read this article:

Your Computer Really Is a Part of You
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/03/heidegger-tools

There is a research how people reacted to malfunction of mouse while they did some test tracking.

Computer malfunction made test subjects aware of it — what Heidegger called “unreadiness-at-hand” — and the computer was no longer part of their cognition.

And I immediately become thinking how the shutter lag, autofocus hunting or EVF refresh rate relate to my own inability to identify with certain cameras and the reasons why I like to work with rangefinders. If the tools are parts of us, the optical viewfinder does not make me feel disconnected with my surrounding. But this might be just me and someone else feels just comfortable with the new breed of EVF cameras.

My intention is not to start another "versus" debate, but to question how really tools we use (and food we eat 🙂 influence ourselves.

 

[Ranchu]

Thank you for that, makes perfect sense.

 

[Neare]

I don't want to debate, but at the very least I agree with you. Things such as AF have always felt (and proved at times) somewhat unreliable to me. It's as if I'm giving someone else the job I should be doing, a computer too of all things. I don't trust technology, simply because it is beyond my own power to do anything about it, one can only hope it does what you want it too. A hammer however I can trust, as long as I whack it down hard enough, it will do what a hammer does. Well, until the hammer breaks.

 

[Sparrow]

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Arthur C Clarke

Any insufficiently advanced technology is a pain in the arse

 

[Pickett Wilson]

Manual focus is also somewhat unreliable. 🙂

 

[Keith]

Manual focus is also somewhat unreliable. 🙂

It seems to become a little less reliable every year past fifty! 😛

 

[Gumby]

(and food we eat 🙂 influence ourselves.

Some people around here seems to eat lots of beans... and then feel compelled to go buy camera equipment. 😀

 

[Sparrow]

It seems to become a little less reliable every year past fifty! 😛

That’s why god created f8, and abhors bokeh 🙂

 

[shadowfox]

Humans acts based on reason, by reasoning we create goals.
How we react to malfunctioning tools are simply a reaction to a disruption to our immediate goal.

That does not make a tool an inherent part of us.

I don't get the article's point.

 

[palec]

I don't get the article's point.

My fault, I picked a quote which at first seemed to be relevant to the point. But it's misleading.

Here is full research paper:
http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0009433

When humans are smoothly coping with entities ready-to-hand, they see through their tools to focus on the task they are using those tools to complete. When that coping is disrupted by a temporary malfunction, humans can no longer see through the malfunctioning tool and experience it as unready-to-hand.

Particularly, the authors claim that 1/f noise characteristic of cognitive behavior should be observable even in relatively fast scales of motor activity at the periphery of the body, and not just in tasks the responsibility for which is traditionally attributed solely to the central nervous system.

 

[Teashop]

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Arthur C Clarke

Any insufficiently advanced technology is a pain in the arse

Stewart: I laughed long and loud at your quote! It perfectly describes my own feelings about anything cursed with a microprocessor..😀

 

[Roger Hicks]

Manual focus is also somewhat unreliable. 🙂

Compared with what?

Cheers,

R.

 

[jonmanjiro]

In his book Overshoot, William Catton used the term homo colossus to describe this concept. One example he uses is the pilot who says he straps on an airplane to fly somewhere.