A Review of The Robot in the Garden: Telerobotics and Telepistemology in the Age of the Internet edited by Ken Goldberg
MIT Press, 2000
ISBN: 0-262-07203-3. 330 pp., $35.00 Review by Tony Atkins
Ball State University
The impact of scientific technologies on society has been a concern of philosophers and critical thinkers since at least the 1600s. For example, the telescope offered us a vision of the world that was never before possible. But could we be sure of what we saw?
Similarly, the Internet has changed the way we think about signs, representation, and reality. It questions our sense of time and space in ways we could have never imagined. For example, Web cameras give us live images from remote distances. Or, not. It's difficult to determine the authenticity of an image. Is it simply a photograph, or is it a real-time shot? Or, was it live at one time but now just something "less than live"? Since the public has gained access to instruments previously reserved for scientists, like the Internet, questions of mediation, epistemology, and trust have resurfaced as technological constructs. Telerobotics is the focus of editor Ken Goldberg's The Robot in the Garden: Telerobotics and Telepistemology in the Age of the Internet, and this has interesting connections to writing online identities. For instance, how is our communicative interaction with machines considered "telepistemological"? Hmm . . . telepistemology is the study of knowledge from a distance. Is an automatic teller machine a robot? How does a vending machine operate as something between the observer and the observed? Goldberg attempts to answer these questions by referring to other social philosophers: [Lev] Manovich considers virtual reality as the culmination of a trend toward deception that goes back to Potemkin's eighteenth-century construction of false facades in Czarist Russia. He describes teleaction, the ability to act over distances in real time, as a "much more radical technology than virtual reality." Citing Bruno Latour's definition of power as the "ability to mobilize and manipulate resources across space and time," Manovich notes that telerobotics systems not only represent reality but allow us to act on it. Now that Internet telerobotic systems deliver teleaction to a broad audience, it is vital to consider the relationship between objects and their signs. Television allowed objects to be transformed instantly into signs; telerobotics allows us, through signs, to instantly touch the objects they represent. (15)
The Robot in the Garden has three sections: 1) Philosophy; 2) Art, History, and Critical Theory; and 3) Engineering, Interface, and System Design.
Philosophy
The essays in Part I deal with telepistemology in two categories: technical and moral. Technical telepistemology seeks to answer problems of skepticism: "Do telerobotics and the Internet provide us with accurate knowledge? To what extent is telerobotic experience equivalent to proximal experience?" (10). Goldberg suggests that moral telepistemology addresses important, relevant questions such as: "How should we act in telerobotically mediated environments?" and "What is the impact of technological mediation on human values?" (10). Hubert L. Dreyfus' essay, "Telepistemology: Descrates's Last Stand," for instance, brings Descartes back to the forefront of philosophy. According to Dreyfus:
But now, at the close of the century, just as philosophers are coming to view the Cartesian subject/object ontology as mistaken and the epistemological problems it generated as pseudo-problems, new tele-technologies such as cellular phones, teleconferencing, telecommuting, home shopping, telerobotics, and Internet web cameras are resurrecting Descartes's epistemological doubts. (54)
Dreyfus goes on to cite pragmatists such as William James and John Dewey, who offer an analysis of Cartesian skepticism which investigates the nature of whether or not we are "spectators" or "involved actors" in our relationship with the world. To explain further the problem of Descartes's inner subject with outer object, Dreyfus suggests:
[T]he experience of coping with an object in real time seems to remove the phenomenological basis for a legitimate concern that the instruments that stand between us and the world may be malfunctioning and so to remove Descartes's motivation for making the distinction between inner subjects and outer objects. The more tele-technology gives us real time interactive tele-presence, the more we get away from a Cartesian sense of being a spectator making inferences from our sense data and the more we have a sense of being in direct touch with objects and people, the more skeptical questions as to whether our interactive prosthesis could be systematically malfunctioning will seem merely academic. (59)
The Robot in the Garden addresses several key points about telepistemology. And, in many ways, telepistemology is important to teachers who teach writing in webbed environments. Moral telepistemology and technical telepistemology are challenging theorists to address questions concerning how much we can "know" or interact with objects controlled by robotics. What are the epistemological assumptions that we make when we are interacting with objects and/or people at a distance? How much do we trust what we see and do on the Internet? Traditional philosophical assumptions about epistemology are being debunked. Philosophy that accounts for knowledge at a distance is sketchy at best, and stitching together old philosophies to account for new "epistemologies" will only take us so far. For compositionists, determining the overlap between moral and technical epistemologies is imperative. When teaching, many of us use/do/teach what we negotiate with students in a hybrid-traditional classroom. We mingle the two philosophies by asking our students to use a webpage or participate in course discussions and write/post papers and journals. An interesting metaphor that Kenneth Burke uses in Language as Symbolic Action reverberates through Goldberg's text. Burke considers using and living with technologies similar to interaction between reader-writer-text:
"Things move, persons act," the person who designs a computing device would be acting, whereas the device itself would be going through whatever sheer motions its design makes possible. These motions could also be utilized as to function like a voice in a dialogue. For instance, when you weigh something, it is as though you asked the scales, "How much does this weigh?" and they "answered," though they would have given the same "answer" if something of the same weight had happened to fall upon the scales, and no one happened to be "asking" any question at all. (64)
Do telerobotic machines act? If they do, does that somehow make them human? "Live?" How many of us program bots in MOOs and encourage our students to interact with them? Does "live," ultimately, mean kairos? Just by investigating telepistemology we are questioning the very idea of whether things "move" or "act." Computer-mediated communication is by nature an act that involves the "moves" of text/s into actions. We do our best to give the objects in our MOO rooms an identity of their own. With this text we may be ready to pass judgment on the "realness" of what we have been referring to as "simulation" or "virtual." In the classroom, however, some teachers wonder where our technical telepistemological philosophy begins and ends, whether the classroom is virtual or real.
Art, History, and Critical Theory
Each time we use our automatic bankcards or drive our cars, every time we use technology, we increase our ability to "know" through relying on space, time, and telerobotics. Part II explores this daily, mediated use of telerobotics in the aesthetic sense. According to Goldberg, "The word media is derived from the Latin for 'middle': Mediated experience, in contrast to immediate experience, inserts something in the middle, between source and viewer" (14). Martin Jay, a contributor to the book who draws on Danish astronomer Ole Roemer, as well as the work of a number of philosophers, argues that the "'pure simulacra' of virtual reality are in fact parasitic on prior corporeal experience and that telerobotic systems have the potential to transmit attenuated indexical traces from their distant sources" (14). Movies like The Matrix and The Patriot incorporate "undeniable illusions," illusions that are created by subverting the index in Cinema. Since filmmakers are able to record and edit images into a spatial and temporal montage, the subverting index allows film to present a viewer with scenes that never existed in reality. Rather than depend on the viewer's "willing suspension of disbelief," computers are used to carefully engineer the "undeniable illusion" (14-15). The art of telerobotics demonstrates the ability to both distort and explain the temporal delay between subject and object. The time that exists between the moment we "click" on an "image" and the moment the image appears allows the viewer to "consider and invigorate the image with meaning" (15).
Engineering, Interface, and System Design
Part III explores issues related to time delay, control, and stability. In Chapter 16, Judith Donath examines "skepticism," our lack of ability to "know" other minds. She claims that unless we know who we are communicating with, we struggle with how to behave. We recongize this while using sychronous exchange programs in our writing classrooms. Donath addresses what she calls "Tele-Identity." She asks, "How do we--or do we--'know' another person who we have encountered in a mediated environment?" (297). If sincerity and competence are the "underpinnings" of a speaker's credibility, then the "mediated world" is in doubt. Because nonverbal cues cannot be easily negotiated in online environments, credibility is more difficult to validate. A person's "Tele-Identity" is in flux. Chatrooms, video conferencing, and email limit our range of social cues which subsequently guide our behavior. Telepistemology is the study of knowledge from a distance, but the identity of the person, place, or thing transferring knowledge affects the ways with which we interpret and give credibility to that knowledge.
Referencing Descartes, Rorty, and Davidson, Michael Idinopulos makes the distinction between "causal" and "epistemic" mediation in this section of the book. According to Idinopulos, "If telerobotic technology on the Internet is to provide us with knowledge, that is, to allow us to know anything about remote environments, it must provide us with knowledge that is epistemically direct" (323). In other words, telerobotic technology should serve as a way for us to perceive those environments directly. When teachers of writing ask students to "log-in," "download file X," "enter chat room Y," or "post a journal entry to Z," they are in many ways asking students to adapt/experience/negotiate knowledge to their own purpose.
The Robot in the Garden: Telerobotics and Telepistemology in the Age of the Internet is comprised of several essays which address mediated epistemology. For many teachers of composition, technology has contributed to a/synchronous online class discussions, electronic paper submission, and assignments that require communication and knowledge at a distance. While we as teachers are struggling to obtain appropriate equipment, software, etc., to keep classes efficient, sufficient, and meaningful, the knowledge we gain from distances and from distance education is having an effect on the way students come to "know" and operate in the world. Ignoring telepistemology in composition classrooms is much like ignoring popular culture when teaching writing. It is evident from the blame television receives during acts of social violence (the Columbine incident, for instance), that popular culture has a large effect on the way students obtain and interpret knowledge, yet many instructors refuse to incorporate popular culture into their teaching. Like popular culture, telepistemology challenges traditional methods of thinking about the way we come to know. Since many colleges and universities are seeking to "fill" the digital divide, compositionists should consider telepistemology as a new branch of epistemology that deserves to be re/figured, re/defined, and re/situated in our community. Another link to our understanding of telepistemology is pragmatism, according to Dreyfus. And in Philosophy and Social Hope, Richard Rorty clearly explains that seeking the truth of existence should not be the goal of philosophy and that we should not expect our philosophies to translate into politics. How is telerobotics related to anti-foundationalism? It seems that a major issue in telepistemolgy is that of skepticism, but to many pragmatists/anti-foundationalists this is not necessarily foundational. Investigating the political outcome of revealing telepistemology as an imperative philosophical study has the possibility of also creating what I might call an "academic" digital divide. While many institutions increase technological resources, there are still many who cannot keep up. This is the way of the digital divide; however, not only will institutions with fewer resources suffer, their access to philosophical inquiry and reflection (which requires technological experience/mediation) will also dwindle. In other words, how can scholars of philosophy join the communicative discourse surrounding these issues when those philosophers have never used an mp3 player, digital/Web camera, or webpage designing software?
How this text can be used by teachers who teach in webbed environments is clear. Students and teachers of English, communication, and philosophy will find this book helpful when studying epistemology, digital rhetoric, communication, philosophy, and online identity. The study of "telepistemology" will become, if it has not already, fundamental to our understanding of the communication process in the 21st Century. Additional information about this text can be found at: |