Digital Objects Extend Human Senses. They Are Now Everywhere. McLuhan Maelstrom: Part Two
McLuhan calls the media “extensions of man” because they each increase the range and power of one part of the human body. In so doing, they effect a modification of consciousness by altering the ratio between the various senses and faculties. His definition of a medium is broad: he devotes twenty-six separate chapters [in Understanding Media] not only to such obvious media as paper, print, telegraph, and radio, but also to wheels, weapons, clocks, money, and houses. — Neil Compton
Your hand can reach only as long as the length of your arm. Your eyes can see about three miles. Your hearing range is 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz. Scientists say your tongue can taste at least 5 flavors: sweet, sour, bitter, salty, and umami. Individually human senses are limited. But because humans have powerful brains, our thinking powers have developed technologies that extend our senses.
Sensory (and identity) extensions are now as common to our lives as the air we breathe. These extensions of man now include avatars and AI, stock market trading bots and love notes from people who do not exist, like Replika.
What does this mean? What are the aftereffects of our new reality?
Any Tool Beyond the Span of Human Senses Is an Extension
To better understand extensions, I propose a new metric of scale: the human span. The idea here is simple: how far do human senses reach? That is the human span. Anything beyond that reach is an extension.
Seeing and understanding extensions helps us appreciate how we use our tools. Each media tool starts as a container: alphabets contain words, cinema and television contain images.
Eventually, with enough use and widespread adoption, each media tool becomes an extension: alphabets extend the eye, radio extends the ear.
An extension becomes a re-builder: as we use and think through these extensions (tools), they rebuild our thinking and behaving. Our consciousness changes to match or echo the logic of the extension. Each tool we use has a tool logic and humans entrain with that operating logic.
Artifacts Everywhere
In time an extension defies our proprioception (our sense of where our body ends and the world begins): it moves from extending the human span to separating from it and standing on its own. Said differently, extensions move from being connected to the human span to being wholly disconnected from it — at which point an extension becomes an artifact.
(Notice that synonyms for artifact include: untruth, deceit, falsehood, fiction, forgery, myth, concoction, fable, fake, fib.) Once we create an extension of ourselves, and each extension becomes a life form (separates from the body to become an independent entity), the extension enters the world as an artifact. We are now awash in artifacts — millions that never existed before — which can make it harder to know truth from falsehood since artifacts can stand for us. Example: a grandmother gets a call from her grandson who has been arrested and he’s in trouble. Except his voice has been copied by AI and the call is part of a scam to get grandma to send money. (The voice artifact stands for the grandson.)
The life an extension artifact lives is its metalife. That is, the artifact starts living a life without you, without your physical self attached. You have many extension artifacts now that have metalives far and wide. Almost anyone in a modern society has a plethora of extension-artifacts (China even numbers its citizens, — a digital tattoo — with their activities captured on video). Below I enumerate 55 different extension-artifacts you may have. These include: online images, photos clothed and unclothed, cell phone messages, retrievable conversations with Alexa, x-rays and CT scans, school records, church affiliations, mortgage applications with variable or fixed percentage rate tied to credit rating, credit scores, birth and death certificates, fingerprints, face recognition scans — on and on.
Extensions Begin to Stand In for Humans
Something happened with the arrival of the Internet of Things: while digitization was already underway, with the acceleration of various interactive technologies, human extensions began to stand in for humans. Seemingly overnight humans became a thing. As everything in the universe became capable of being digitized humans in all our dimensions became digitized too. And not just digitized as a whole. Our teeth became x-ray digital artifacts at the dentist’s office; our driver’s license and social security number became digital artifacts of identification; our tweets and social media posts and pictures, already digital artifacts became ineradicable testimony, at times a prisoner’s box from which there was no escape. These (disconnected from us) artifacts are highly useful, for example in forensics which aims to match an artifact with a human.
Those were a few examples of how extensions have begun to deconstruct us; but what is more important is to understand the nature and logic of extensions.
Here is a rundown of aftereffects now that extensions have begun to stand in for humans:
- You too have become a digital object (prompting Jaron Lanier to write You Are Not a Gadget)
- David Weinberger exclaimed Everything Is Miscellaneous. This means: everything in the world now, including you, is an object that can (and will) be digitized
- In this world of digital miscellany, you have become infinitely reproducible (in your miscellaneous parts)
- Your identity is both physical and digital (a metalife), so you have at least two lives: your bio life of eating and sleeping and your digital life (metalife)
- At any point your digital life (metalife) may separate from your bio life, for example when a image of you is used for a fake identity (see the Erica Marsh example below)
- Separation from you enables your extension to become an artifact — apart from what it separated from (namely you): fingerprints, facial scan, DNA, medical record, a photo on Instagram, on and on.
- The world is now filled with artifact-extensions from bio-carbon humans: in some instances, one may be mistaken for the other (for example, when your driver’s license, an artifact, is altered by a criminal and he “becomes” you), a crime of conflation (aka identity theft) that will only grow more serious in the future
- Having never understood tool logic or the morphing nature of digital extensions, we are at a considerable disadvantage in a world of miscellaneous artifacts
- The good news: it is not too late to begin to study and understand the nature of extensions
Erica Marsh: Extensions Turn Fake (A Cautionary Tale)
Consider Erica Marsh, a seemingly-real woman (an extension faking humanness) who quickly rose to fame earlier this year as a viral left-wing voice on social media. Her incendiary tweets drew millions of views and the ire of conservatives, who pointed to her outlandish comments comparing Republicans to pedophiles and conservative Supreme Court justices to Nazis as examples of extreme liberalism run amok.
Marsh’s top tweet, viewed more than 27 million times, generated a firestorm of controversy and drew attention beyond the account’s 130,000 followers, including a public reply from Florida Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz, who tweeted, “I strongly disagree with this racist allegation.”
Erica Marsh does not exist. A fake identity with a fake online account, the image of Marsh stolen from another woman’s Facebook page when she was ten years younger, Marsh was designed to foster and exploit outrage. (The photo of the smiling blonde young woman that topped Erica Marsh’s Twitter account is actually a picture of a wife and mother of two living in Florida.)
Hany Farid, a digital forensics expert and professor of computer science at UC Berkeley, reviewed the photos and found no evidence they were manipulated or generated by AI. He remarked:
“It’s a cautionary tale…. You’re seeing people make mistakes on both sides. They think fake things are real and real things are fake, and they both have really interesting but different consequences too.”
Fake things are real and real things are fake. And each has different consequences. This is the current state of extensions. They can not only stand in for us (as when your avatar in the Metaverse represents you); in some instances, a digital extension can replace you. For example, identity theft: without physically doing anything to present itself IRL, an extension — say a social security number or a driver’s license — can be used to empty your bank account, charge up thousands of dollars at retail, or steal funds from an unsuspecting digital money cache. The bugbear of replacement is that an extension looks and acts like us. Except that “us” may not be us.
The Real Fake: When Extensions Replace and Replacements Lie
Real or fake? Extensions are not neutral, they now demand verifying. Extension verification is now a pressing issue. This being-and-nothingness quandary, half-us half-not-us, is typical of any extensions that reach beyond our senses and may devolve to replace us. Jia Tolentino called social media a trick mirror, meaning that when we see ourselves in that mirror the likeness is similar but distorted.
In new media you can see yourself; others can see you, but this is a different you than flesh-and-blood you. It is a new reality: part us, part not-us; part authentic, part inauthentic. This is the quandary we are living every day now.
Addressing these issues the researcher and professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, Jonathan Haidt and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt predict:
1. AI-enhanced social media will wash ever-larger torrents of garbage into our public conversation.
2. Personalized super-influencers will make it much easier for companies, criminals, and foreign agents to influence us to do their bidding via social media platforms.
3. AI will make social media much more addictive for children, thereby accelerating the ongoing teen mental illness epidemic.
4. AI will change social media in ways that strengthen authoritarian regimes (particularly China) and weaken liberal democracies, particularly polarized ones, such as the USA.
As a remedy, Haidt and Schmidt recommend “five reforms aimed mostly at increasing everyone’s ability to trust the people, algorithms, and content they encounter online.” These are reforms designed to bring extensions back within the reach of human senses.
1. Authenticate all users, including bots
2. Mark AI-generated audio and visual content
3. Require data transparency with users, government officials, and researchers
4. Clarify that platforms can sometimes be liable for the choices they make and the content they promote
5. Raise the age of “internet adulthood” to 16 and enforce it
We are at a tipping point: extensions of man now demand the same care, attention, and deliberation as any human offspring. The more extensions we deploy in various areas of our lives, the more this demand becomes evident and the larger the unaddressed dilemma of digital disregard grows.
