You are here

Abstract

The continuing expansion of the visible domain, increasingly including and giving force (and reality) to the creations of our imagination and to formerly inaccessible places and dimensions of our unfolding universe, has produced a radical shift of the shared concepts of time and space. Suddenly, the statement « you are here » has a very different meaning. Thanks to the proliferation and increased mastery of interactive, immersive and socially engaging media, we have passed beyond the simple curiosity for technologies to find ourselves, as MacLuhan professed, dressed and immersed in them. Immersed indeed we are, collectively engaged in a « reality jam » with the physical, the artificial, the augmented, and the virtual. In the process, we have turned from spectators to users, visitors and now inhabitants of our own crafts. Questions such as « Who am I? », « Who are you? », « Where are we? », « How are we supposed to behave? », are now being asked with new relevance and urgency. Survival skills such as conversation, posture, attitude, or simply what to wear, are being reformulated on the fly by the natives and immigrants of this new territory that does not always perfectly accommodates the biological features we inherited from evolution.