Mediated Senses

This morning, I saw an "Infographics Feature" from the MIT Technology Review with the portentous title, "The Mobile Device Is Becoming Humankind's Primary Tool." One of the graphs shows that there will soon be almost as many cell phones and mobile devices in the world as there are people. It then goes on to illustrate what surveys show about how those devices are used.

Also, a friend, in response to yesterday's post on "Horses and Biplanes" sent me a piece about railroads and the introduction of time zones from Wired, "Nov. 18, 1883: Railroad Time Goes Coast to Coast." He was struck by how difficult it was to get everyone's time synchronized and the scale of problems this caused.

Those two pieces do not have much to do with each other superficially, but they do share a link. The MIT feature is about how smartphones and other mobile devices are coming to mediate our interactions with reality. The Wired piece is about a juncture when technology greatly increased its role in mediating one of our senses - time. Likewise, "Horses and Biplanes" ended by observing that our digitally mediated environment might be affecting our ability to understand the embodied past. It might make it easier to understand it in an abstract way, but at the same time it makes it harder for us to identify with the physical and sensory experiences of our ancestors.

Clocks in the fourteenth century were the first complex machines to mediate between one of our senses and the world. Earlier, language, writing, art, and calendars had all played roles in mediating reality, but with the invention of mechanical time keeping, I suspect a fundamental change occurred. Today our sense of time is almost wholly artificial and our trust in instrumentation is nearly complete. (I am reminded of those stories of people who have driven their cars into creeks and ponds because their GPS system told them that there was a road or bridge that did not exist.) That would have been essentially inconceivable in the 1380s, but one of the effects of clocks on history, it seems to me, is that it made us more amenable to trusting devices more than our senses.