From information to perception: The new design of the emerging computer technologies and its effects

Abstract

The aim of the work is to introduce the elements we need to analyse the new emerging digital technologies, focussing on the novelties they introduce. These new technologies are designed to merge computers into our world by being intertwined with our daily activities and by visualising digital objects in our surroundings. Computers, while calculators at their inception, have been conceived of as information processing devices, their use as data processing. Today the same technology directly aims to develop a new way of being present in the world. If we continue to use our previous conception of them, too much oriented toward the captured and computed information, we are at risk of loosing the innovative aspects of these devices concerning the way they relate to the users’ life. History shows that the computers’ design has evolved and so has the role of these devices in society. In the second part we will use a phenomenological and postphenomenological analysis to tackle the novelties these devices are introducing. Especially we will focus on the term “transparent” and we will show how we need to use two different notions of transparency in order to better understand what these devices produce. Therefore, in conclusion, we will show how we need to think of the possible effects of these new technologies, not in term of the information computed by the device, but in terms of the device’s actions in our world. Computers must be something which deeply changes our world by making it literally “digitally” embedded. New computer technologies are making the “data” perceptual and so the notion of “information” has to be re-framed.