Mdia CNJ 2.2 PD

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PUBLIC DRAFT: VERSION 2.2
On Media Conjectural and Things to Come.

Roman Onufrijchuk
I: Them
1.
It appears we are well on our way to an age of lively stuff; our material culture – for
over two centuries or so -- has gone from the mere inanimate to automated 1, and
soon perhaps to something verging animate. This "lively stuff" is something new.
Aspects of it, unique emergent media, may come to have a profound effect on the
character of our lives or those of our descendants. What are we to make of it? How
are we to understand, in advance, what sorts of questions such a technology will
raise, how it will enable which modalities of relatedness and interrelatedness, how
will it predispose us to think of, act upon and with things? How could it shape our
experience and understanding of others? How might this emergent media form
nuance our behaviors as moral actors? Would these "new” new media condition our
orientations to what and who matter in our lives? While what follows is woven in the
spirit of conjecture – a conclusion based on indicators rather than hard facts -- that
of which it sets out to inquire is not. While our tone is provisional, the issues are
quietly pressing. What we’ll be calling the animates are very possibly around the
corner; questions later than sooner may prove to be purely conjectural in face of fact
put paid.
Animates? One is tempted to say "robots" and be done -- for a very significant
aspect of the "new" new media will involve robotics, and in no small measure. Were
it not for the apparently continuous trend toward wireless systematic integration,
which Blue space implies and enables, robots would suffice. Rather, this new "new
medium" (or media, for the parameters cannot yet be known) will be characterized
by environmental intelligence, post graphic user interfaces (GUI), and technologies
that possess varying degrees of autonomy, personality, affect- and environment-
sensitive interactivity, ability to learn and “bond” with their owners, and some of
1
For a concise history see: Witold Rybczynski, Taming the Tiger: The Struggle to Control Technology (New
York: Viking Press, 1983).
On Media Conjectural and Things to Come. © Roman Onufrijchuk. February, 2005

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them will be free-standing ambulatory dexterous informatic artefacts -- robots2.
Whereas robots, children of the 60s, have worked shop floors for nearly two
generations, the animates will move into our homes, offices, airports, clinics and
hospitals as well as other institutional settings. For some an enabling hopeful vision,
for others further colonization of daily life by mechanism, surveillance and tacit
compliance to a logic not one's own: But the next generation, or speciation, of our
media and material culture is surely moving in this direction. How do we who study
media, and who take responsibility for the future by the practice of teaching, prepare
ourselves, our intellectual tools and the future, for what such new media might
imply? How to systematically query that which has not yet appeared? Are we at
risk, that this should be an exigence?
We are up against something subtler than risk, a force or emergent body of issues
suppler and more diffuse. In the popular imagination it is exactly risk that is figured.
“3-ways people safe” – appropriating and citing Asimov’s rules of robotics –
proclaims an ad for the machines in I Robot3. While the images of technology run
amok and turning on its makers is compelling and dramatic enough, the analogy
would be to argue that the real effects of the automobile on North American societies
can be equated by the number of people killed in car crashes. It’s a factor, and very
real, but hardly the only effect of the automobile on daily life. To complicate
matters, the emergence of this “lively stuff” is likely to proceed as it has – relatively
gradually and more by a capillary means than an overnight “invasion.” Not the
arrival of the TV, one day there was radio and the next, there were pictures talking
and things showing too. The evolution of the animates will be more of a bonding,
cross-fertilization and hybridization, ultimately a confluence of many separate
technologies, some annealing quickly and some over time. Rather than the animates
“arriving” one morning, it is far more likely that we’ll wake up one morning, find one
of them making the coffee, and think nothing of it.
In advance of this potential arrival, this effective but quiet coalescence, and because
the constituents are still “under construction” and “being prototyped,” well-grounded
2
Francisco Goldman, A Robot for the Masses (New York Times Magazine, 2004 [cited 15 December
2004]); available from
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/28/magazine/28ROBO.html?ex=1104814800&en=ccb85bd8a6015d4f&
ei=5070&oref=login.
3
Alex Proyas, "I Robot," (USA: 20the Century Fox, 2004).

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and deeply considered interventions are a possibility, perhaps ultimately a

responsibility. Of all the technologies we’ve produced thus far, this one is perhaps
the most seductive. By which means will we get beyond the promises,
advertisements, actual benefits, to the more diffuse effects the animates might
bring. No one knew in advance what the future effects of Johannes Gutenberg’s or
Henry Ford’s innovations would be. Marshall McLuhan (1911-1981), though often
accused of technological determinism, insisted that the consequences of the
technological and pecuniary imperatives were inevitable only so long as people
remained well adjusted or asleep, in a word -- unaware. In absence of “integral
awareness” and oppositional practice, the inevitable becomes an imperative. In the
interest of advertising people of the often pernicious and “subliminal” or
“environmental” effects of technologies and media on them, he developed his “new
science4.” We’ll return to McLuhan’s method for prognosis, as it is both based on a
communication paradigm for research and because it offers much, including
limitations. That said, the key idea from McLuhan’s point of view was that nothing
was inevitable, if people could be somehow jarred out their well-adjusted states.
Now, how exactly do you “maladjust” yourself or others to comfort, convenience,
service, reliability, intelligence, sensitivity and perhaps companionship? Our ability
to develop intricate, deeply nuanced and meaningful relationships with our stuff is
ancient. What shall we make of lively stuff?
Negative aspects or unintended effects of many of our technological achievements,

McLuhan insisted, emerge from the unforeseen, and more often still, from out of the
unattended and overlooked 5. We have developed the science of risk assessment to
gauge the threats and trade-offs. Yet, if the animates deliver on even a portion of
the expectation reasonably supported by the indicators, then the effects will not fall
into the realm of a threat, but rather enablements and some kind of conditioning
across a wide range of experience, attention, practice and interest. Rather than
threat, we are faced with perhaps a tool, perhaps a toy, and with capabilities far
4
I have elaborated on the relation between Innian advances in communication research methods and a
systematic methodology for media effects assessment that can be extracted from McLuhan’s corpus.
Roman Onufrijchuk, "Introducing Innis/Mcluhan Concluding: The Innis in Mcluhan's "System"'," Continuum
7, no. Fall (1993).
5
In this respect see Edward Tenner, Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended
Consequences, 1st ed. (New York: Knopf, 1996), Anthony Wilden, Man and Woman, War and Peace : The
Strategist's Companion (London ; New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987). McLuhan ran this theme
through a number of metaphors and figurations – among these are “rearview mirrorism” and Narcissus
narcosis. See Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill,
1964).

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beyond anything possessed by either before.
There are no “animates” yet, though the stuff does get livelier daily. The term
"smart," rather than “lively,” is normally used to designate artefacts with computer
chips in them. In the present we hear about, and can even buy, prototypes of semi-
satisfactory smart cars and smart ovens, houses and dust, windows and paint,
fabrics and flooring, toilets and toys. This quiet, gradual but unrelenting expansion
of artefactual "smartness," combined with changes in markets, technologies,
materials, power supply, states of knowledge & "know how," and public attitudes is
leading us to the lively new media that may yet come to characterize this century.
The "smart" is actually programmed, essentially "instinctive," and mostly inert. But
the conjectural "lively" stuff to come will probably move as well as do, and make,
"act" in addition to being an actant, transact, perhaps transbody and/or transfigure
who we are.
2.
The recent United Nations Economic Council for Europe report on the state of things
robotic tells us that orders for domestic, companion, and intimate robotic
technologies surpassed those for industrial robots in 2003-4. The report’s authors
further projected that the current global population of robots of 2.1 million will have
reached over 10 million by the end of the century's first decade6. The largest part of
that population is expected to be in settings other than the factory. To keep matters
firmly in perspective, however, it’s worth noting that the discourse about robots
“soon” assisting in the care for the elderly and infirm is over 30 years old, and no
such robotic help has made it to general application7. The robot helper, however, is
an "insistent technology" that has taken many forms in the dreams and imaginative
products of our species: folklore, fable, myth, painting, theatre (where the word
"robot" was born), film, literature, and nightmare8. Based on that evidence alone,
one could surmise that the robotic servant is as inevitable as was heavier-than-air
flight. They may never look like the characters "David" nor "Teddy" in Spielberg’s
6
United Nations Economic Commission for Europe UNECE, World Robotics 2004 [PDF] (United Nations,
October 20 2004 [cited December 15 2004]); available from
http://www.unece.org/press/pr2004/04robots_index.htm.
7
It should be noted too, however, that the I Robot company now has a robotic unit that dispenses
medications in a number of America’s leading hospitals.
8
Frank Zingrone, "Laws of Media: The Pentad and Technical Syncretism," McLuhan Studies: explorations
in culture and communication 1, no. 1 (1991).

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AI9 (Mother: "He's a smart toy,” and Teddy, in a voice rich in cognac and cigars,
"I'm NO toy!"), though I wouldn't rule out Teddy.
Thinking of something related if not exactly the same, cognitive psychologist and
influential user-oriented design Donald Norman advocate, conjectured animates
before there was a World Wide Web and e-mail was still only for the technologically
initiated 10. He imagined what we are calling the animates exactly as a “Teddy.”
Because these technologies would accompany us from cradle to grave, and because
they’d be our playmates and teachers in childhood, Norman conjectured, they’d
come to be known as “Teddy’s.” They’d change in form, he suggested, as we grew
in experience, sophistication of interest and responsibility, but would possess within
them a record of our entire lives, and so with a neotic pathos, they’d remain
“Teddy’s” for life. Thus a “core,” some internal “guts,” would remain continuous
whilst the form and thing itself changed. Teddies would be small enough not to be a
bother, intelligent and resourceful, a kind of PDA on steroids, and become
companions – intimates.
A rueful tone pervades Norman’s conjecturing of 1992: He noted although we

wanted only the benefits and none of the problems of such a technology:
Alas technology is always a double-edged sword, always showing two faces to

the world. Every benefit has its accompanying drawback. I have mixed
feelings about this Teddy. I can imagine the good things. I can fear the bad.
11
But actually I have little choice in the matter. It is coming into being .
The actual physical manifestation of Norman’s animate is bit more slippery than the
friendly name Teddy implies. We feel a tension between a Teddy Bear and
something like formless and not unlike Alessandro Mendini’s “nebulous informatic
object” acting yet defying physical definition. This “thing” would be subjects to
accretions and peripherals, to sheathing by producer, re-sheathing in decals or
custom surfaces by the user, up-grades, and -- by its inner workings and
performativities -- telling user and designer nothing about what its form and function
might be12. A few years deeper into the zeitgeist informing Mendini, in neighbouring
France Jean-Francois Lyotard curated an exhibition at the Centre Pompidou meant to
9
Steven Spielberg, "A.I. Artificial Intelligence," (USA: Dream Works Home Entertainment, 2001).
10
Donald A. Norman, Turn Signals Are the Facial Expressions of Automobiles (Reading, Mass.: Addison-
Wesley, 1992).
11
Ibid.
12
Maurizio Morgantini, "Man Confronted by the Third Technological Revolution," in Design Discourse:
History/Theory/Criticism, ed. Victor Margolin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).

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challenge the usual ontological assumptions about the distinction between people
and things. “The Immaterials” exhibit and installations were to do this by
demonstrating the animate-like qualities of electronic communication technologies,
particularly nascent IT13. This sensibility shared with the observations of previous
decades leading to the discourse about the fragmentation of needs and wants as
determinate states and a concomitant “dematerialization of objects14.
In an interesting re-materialization, this “nebulous informatic object,” appeared as

an emotional machine and ultimately a robot over a decade later when Norman
returned to the topic again. Working through his project describing the emotional or
aesthetic imperative in design and experience, Norman arrived at the question of
emotional machines – a theme that had been appearing in his less publicized work
through the intervening years15. Just as in 1992, he again posed a series of ethical
questions that such technologies could represent interwoven with his argument for
why such technologies are inevitable. In 2004 Norman wrote:
It is not too early to think about the future difficulties that intelligent and
emotional machines may give rise to. There are numerous practical, moral,
legal and ethical issues to think about. Most are still far in the future but there
16
is a good reason to start now -- so when problems arise, we will be ready .
The theme echoes from 1992 where -- having first meditated on the apparent
inevitability of the Teddy -- Norman reflected, and posed the guiding this excursus:
And if human beings are not sufficiently intelligent about its design,
17
functionality and use, it will forever alter our lives in ways we do not want .
But is it to be problems, fears, and ways we do not want, only? And, given life's
short and Commander Data and the Borg are long way up the future's tooth, why
inquire? Why not leave it to the artists and speculative fabulists to spin the
13
Jean Francois Lyotard, "Les Immateriaux (the Immaterials)," Art & Text 17, no. April (1985).
14
See Ann Ferebee, A History of Design from the Victorian Era to the Present: A Survey of Modern Style in
Architecture, Interior Design, Graphic Design, and Photography (New York: Van Nostrand, 1970), William
Leiss, The Limits to Satisfaction: An Essay on the Problem of Needs and Commodities (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1976), William Leiss, Stephen Kline, and Sut Jhally, Social Communication in
Advertising: Persons, Products and Images of Well-Being, trans. 2 (Scarborough: Nelson, 1990), Tibor
Scitovsky, The Joyless Economy: An Inquiry into Human Satisfaction and Consumer Dissatisfaction
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976). The theme also plays a central role in Stuart Ewen, All
Consuming Images: The Politics of Style in Contemporary Culture (New York: Basic Books, 1988)..
15
Norman had worked as a consultant to a California robotics firm developing a personal robot. Donald A.
Norman, Emotional Design: Why We Love or Hate Everyday Things (Cambridge: Basic, 2004)..
16
Ibid.
17
Norman, Turn Signals Are the Facial Expressions of Automobiles.

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possibilities and put our trust in some social osmosis leading us to discernment? Is
there anything inherently wrong with a gradual adaptation to colonization by
convenience, personablitiy and personalization, service and intelligence, security and
their technological vehicles? This, of course, depends on who's looking. Surely, here
are opportunities and imperatives. Regardless of who’s looking, however, the
indicators suggest the animates will appear throughout out world and affect us or our
descendents. Thus, how to gauge the animates’ potential impact, assess the trade-
offs and costs involved in their dissemination and uses, and prepare ourselves for the
things to come?
3.
What kind of medium be these animates? “Anima,” a word with a long history, is
Latin for “soul,” the Greek equivalent being “psyche.” Henrik Lorenz suggests that
our basic ideas about the soul had taken shape by the time of Socrates’ death18
(469-399 BCE) when the soul was commonly “thought as spoken” as having four
main defining aspects: First the psyche or anima was thought the distinguishing
quality of living things. Second, the soul was something subject to emotional states.
Capability at planning and pragmatic action was another characteristic of the soul.
And the anima was a bearer of “virtues such as courage or justice,” or vices and
weaknesses. We pause: With these ancient and still resonant requirements in mind,
can we put a “soul” in a machine? Can a toaster be said to be alive (or ever be said
to be alive)? Would you want to get around in an emotional automobile: Imagine
that mobile staging ground for road rage! Planning, on the other hand, along with
calculating, sorting, we gladly hive off to the machines. And there is a base from
which to argue that any artefact, in so far as it fits within a cultural matrix, can be
said to possess virtues or express flaws in its maker’s and therefore its own
character. But a soul?
Putting a soul in a car or toothbrush is very unlikely since we’re hard pressed to
demonstrate the existence of a soul scientifically in the first place (and perhaps
18
Hendrik Lorenz, Ancient Theories of Soul (Winter 2003 Edition) (The Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy, 2003 [cited January 21 2005]); available from
http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2003/entries/ancient-soul. Further elaboration can be obtained
from E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951). Jaynes
provides a systematic discussion of the Homeric figurations that would combine into the idea that would
then be influential in other major doctrinal formations: Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the
Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976).

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consciousness, for that matter). That said, once you’ve “met” ELIZA and applied a
dash of imagination, however, it’s not hard to project that human communication
mimetics -- corporal, vocal, gestural, emotive – can easily feel like conversation with
an actual person (albeit in typed form and not for all that long). ELIZA, a interactive
application available on the Net, is primitive by anyone’s standard but still on the
web, and still regularly and plentifully visited 19. Interestingly, she anticipates the
immediate and virtually text messaging enabled by SMS and related protocols today.
ELIZA adumbrates where interaction with our smart new media might be taking us
perhaps a generation from now: new modalities of mediation by our things, with
others, and certainly within ourselves. If we easily, readily, sometimes eagerly, and
virtually always at some expense, suspend disbelief to immerse into narrative on TV,
at the theatre, or into interactivity of a game, why not while interacting with an
apparently sentient, emotionally receptive and lively, personable and responsive,
content rich, amicable mechanical or informatic thing?
To say that we make something animate usually means to enable something to

move as if it were alive, this is how the term is used in creating “cartoons” and
“anime.” The more an entity appears to move of its own volition, the more we
suspect it is alive20. The greater the degree of autonomy, unique quirkiness, a
defect here and a there, and the thing becomes even more lifelike21. Thus, by
“animated” we mean things loaded with technologies that enable them to mimic and
reduplicate biological, psychological and, quite literally, anthropomorphic
communication processes. Invariably these will be sophisticated enough
technologies to appear simple, transparent in their functioning, but present to us in
ways no technology or animal has ever been before.
We can conjecture an ecology or system of technologies enabled to varying degrees

with capability for rich human interaction, information transaction, and transmission.
Continuous improvements in capturing and simulating what Neal Stephenson called
the “vapour of expression,22” advances culminating in natural spoken language
interface, and wireless technologies, broadband, Internet integrating with the
19
http://www.manifestation.com/neurotoys/eliza.php3 and also Joseph Weizenbaum, Eliza--a Computer
Program for the Study of Natural Language Communication between Man and Machine (Volume 9 Number
1) (Communications of the ACM, (): 36-35., 1966 [cited February 11 2005]); available from
http://i5.nyu.edu/~mm64/x52.9265/january1966.html.
21
Paul Bloom, Descartes' Baby: How the Science of Child Development Explains What Makes Us Human
(New York: Basic Books, 2004).
22
Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash, Bantam paperback ed. (New York: Bantam Books, 1993).

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increasing power, sophistication and dropping costs of components and materials,

could produce a companion technology not unlike Norman’s Teddy but with
additional features. We may assume animates will possess all the features of “smart
phones” that are currently the fastest speciating and spreading personal technology
– in terms of their development, diversification and almost global diffusion.
Like today’s smart phones, animates will connect, receive, store and retrieve as well
as send data in voice, text, graphic and image. They will also record and retrieve
audio and video – smart phones already do all these things. Smart phones, poised
to perhaps overwhelm the PDA, offer bundles of communication platforms and
formats, variations on all the functions provided by the current personal digital
assistants. Thus we expect animates to come equipped with the “smarts” to
schedule our lives, do the reminders. There’s more, however: drawing on
databases of precedent messages (I already have a default outgoing message
system of about ten archived “Please call . . . ,” “Meeting cancelled . . . ,” “Call me .
. . “ that came with my nothing-special mobile handset), animates might infer and
draft potential answers from received and pre-screened messages. Better yet, they
might be deputized to deal with nuisance e-mails from the less-than-happily-
tolerated; a kind of “vietz” or feint in which the nuisance thinks they’re
communicating with you when in fact it’s Teddy23. The ad copy pitching the
upgraded capability is equally imaginable – “Is it you, or Teddy? They’ll never know
for sure!”
Animates will be wireless. Like “smart phones” they’ll be equipped with Bluetooth
protocols enabling users to communicate with and “operate” other devices and
appliances through them. This capability has just begun to emerge into our midst.
Bluetooth technologies, enabling machines to work together on wireless command
from anywhere in the coverage area, are the another of the first real steps toward
the sort of distributed, effective and affective personal communication ecology the
animates will be developed in part to realize and serve. We are modeling these “new
new” media on what already exists or is soon within reach; let’s push a little further
into the conjectural.
4.
23
Unless, of course, your Teddy is speaking to their Teddy. That too?

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So what will it be, this animate? Would it be a breadbox on wheels, a manikin, a

hairy homunculus, avuncular machine-work gnome, sympathetic plushy toy, or
perhaps only a nebulous informatic object? The figuration thus far – the emotional
machine or robot articulated in Norman’s Teddy, Dick’s/Scott’s androids/replicants,
and Kubrick’s/Spielberg’s mechas – embody the unresolved tensions around what
may actually be the shape of things to come, or not as the case may be. Many
technologists would agree that a human-like robot is unlikely24, what is more to be
expected is a distributed computing and robotics – many specialized smaller devices
working together25. While the “Swiss army knife” be-all, end-all device is not likely,
this not to say that something in the order of an application or program that runs
everything else is to be ruled out.
If anything, this arrangement of some central command core and a “gang” or “mob”
of connected devices and peripherals as well as “avatars” of one sort or another is
likely to be the case. The core would be conceptually closest to what Norman
describes in the 1992 article, something – a learning, emotionally receptive,
remembering and retelling “entity” – that can migrate from one Teddy-shell to
another. Norman suggests that Teddies could take the shape of piece of jewelry or
intimate object, clothing -- and we might add --a car, a skateboard, belt buckle,
piece of furniture, a bio-integrated implant, an appliance. Why not an ambulatory
pint-sized work of art26?
We could conjecture a typology of the animates: A controlling core, something like a

“presence,” “mind,” or “intelligence” and its avatars, manifestations and extensions.
The “core,” or perhaps “CPU” might “reside” where one does, not unlike the PC
24
One shouldn’t be too sure. If recent developments in Japan stand the test of application, a robotic
receptionist (multilingual and with a sense of irony, no less) may be just around the corner. Media
Advanced and Kokoro Co., Actroid: Reception Robot [Web site] (Advanced Media & Kokoro Co., 2005
[cited April 6 2005]); available from http://www.nedo.go.jp/english/expo2005/robot-01.html, For a more
independent vuew: Barb Dybwad, Actroid Robot Greets Japan World Expo Visitors a Bit Too Naturally
[Blog] (Engadget, 2005 [cited 2005]); available from
http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000627035261/, and Shihio Tomioka, Actroids' in the Limelight:
Robots at Aichi Expo out to Show and Test Future Roles (The Asahi Shimbun, 2005 [cited 6 April 2005]);
available from http://www.asahi.com/english/Herald-asahi/TKY200504020152.html.
25
Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Perseus Publishing,
2002). Also Eric Bergman and Donald A. Norman, "Making Technology Invisible: A Conversation with Don
Norman," in Information Appliances and Beyond : Interaction Design for Consumer Products, ed. Eric
Bergman (San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 2000). and Economist, "Monitor," The Economist,
September 16 2004.
26
In this regard, the Scots writer Iain M. Banks, in his fictional civilization called simply “the Culture”
offers some of the most imaginative and vivid depictions of what an animate ecology might consist of.
See: Iain M Banks, Consider Phlebas (London: Orbit, 1992), Iain M Banks, Excession (London: Orbit,
1999), Iain M Banks, Look to Windward (London: Orbit, 2000), Iain M Banks, Player of Games (London:
Orbit, 1992), Iain M Banks, Use of Weapons (London: Orbit, 1992).

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today. Additionally, if we extrapolate on the indicators, we may imagine such a core

unit being manifest throughout an environment as a “presence,” or in an ambulatory
or easily portable form, something of a “familiar.” Further, the “CPU” would also be
the modulating and controlling node of an intimate and personal animate
environment. We can imagine this CPU as the interface with various other purpose-
built devices and appliances of varying “intelligence.” Such “elementals” or
processors in various other objects, appliances, and service “bots” would be designed
to enable and reflect their purposes -- vacuuming, mowing lawns, clearing clogs in
the plumbing and drainage, serving as supports and walkers, and so on. There
might also be “avatars.” Not only might the “CPU” present itself in an ambulatory or
easily portable avatar, but animate technologies would make avatars available to
users as well. Such avatars, themselves “Teddy” in mobile form, like those used as
proxies in virtual worlds, may migrate to remote sensing and communicational
applications. In these circumstances they might play roles as “familiars” when one
travels (portable family and friends for company), or if prefers not to go to a
business meeting in a far off place (renting an animate proxy like a car and sending
it in one’s stead).
A personal animate communication ecology could be very much enabling and

empowering, and therefore in no small part inviting. Thus, the animates will perhaps
be driven by consumer demand? Such is one of drivers in the UNECE report cited
above. It is also clear that consumer considerations are neither the only ones, nor
the only set of forces driving R&D. Armed animates have significant military
applications and implications. On the killing fields, animates would be more
intelligent hunters than the robots currently being deployed. Like them, they’d
potentially feel no fear, no hunger, or discomfort, nor conscience (if it was
“programmed out”) when going about their grim assigned tasks. Automated security
systems, beginning to take their places in our world, are one thing, but what would
animate security systems imply? To be sure, an institutional or military animate
ecology with the prospect of deployment of force can be chilling, and -- depending on
who’s animate it is -- outright terrifying. Paranoid dreams and claustrophobic
fantasies feed well off the prospects. But that’s just it – and a key component of
Norman’s question – unless we have some way to systematically conjecture this new
medium we are left with hit and miss, insight, hyperbole, unfounded fears,
unachievable goals and unexpected consequences coming at us from out of the

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unnoticed, unintended, and unforeseen.
5.
We might argue the impact of animates on daily life can be deduced from the
imperatives driving their emergence. Commercial, business, market, military, and
corporate imperatives would loom large, but by no means fill the horizon. As Pacey
has demonstrated, more imperatives are at work in technological innovation than
often meet the eye27. In addition to the imperatives listed, we could add
technological imperatives, as well as the existential pleasures of overcoming
insurmountable problems (can we get this thing to climb stairs?) and master
elemental forces (how can we power this thing indefinitely?). There are imperatives
that appear from the user sphere – demographics, lifestyles, play imperatives, health
and therapeutic as well as security imperatives. The list goes on because this
technology will not be born in a bicycle shop, as was the Kitty Hawk or an ego-driven
lab in East Orange, New Jersey, as was the electric light bulb. The animates are
coalescing out of diverse labours of hundreds of researchers in universities, labs, and
research installations around the world.
Could we understand them by analogy drawn from historical experiences – an

archeology of sorts? Some progress has been made in this area, but not enough to
fully guide us28. Nor can we understand them grasp them by analogy to a social
archeology that points to slaves, servants and attendants, workers or companions of
various sorts as models. For no slave, no servant, would ever have ever been
endowed by capacities such as animates, especially in their mediational and
aggregate forms. Their archeology is far more complex and points also in the
directions of the histories of psychology, magic, religion, myth and folklore;
contemporary genres such science and speculative fiction; the histories of toys in
general, Teddy Bears, marionettes, action figures and dolls, collectible figurines in
particular. What is more, since the animates as media will be, above all else,
relational conditioners, we might explore their emergence and subsequent effects on
political and personal economies of the communication by extrapolating from the
arrival of the alphabet, the printing press or in Internet?
27
Arnold Pacey, The Culture of Technology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983).
28
Gaby Wood, Living Dolls: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life (London: Faber and Faber,
2002).

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In a recent text on the do’s and don’ts of communication and cultural research,
Deacon et al, after admonishing us that there is no such field as communication but
rather a social phenomenon that many different kinds of social scientists study,
recommend that we approach issues of communication from one or a combination of
three basic approaches29. Neither history, nor any of its practitioners are included,
presumably because this meant to be a “practical guide to media and cultural
analysis.” Nor is there any note of comparative approaches30, again perhaps
pragmatics of application does not seem apparent to the authors. The three selected
research grounds – positivist, interpretive/hermeneutic and critical realist – all have
merits and take apart communication questions in useful ways. But all cases, the
methods Deacon recommends could be applied to the “hype” that accompanies the
proto-animate technologies or the economic and interest group imperatives driving
their development. If we are to address Norman’s question, or at least anticipate
the scope it requires of us, we will need to remain both in the realm of conjecture as
well as scanning wider spectra of human relational phenomena.
6.
In advance of exploring relational phenomena, might we not turn to the “things
themselves,” at least insofar as they might be “to hand.” We could simulate the
simulacrum and engage it. We might probe how the animate performs as a tool – a
mere means to an end. Here “productivity,” might be the virtue. Would we need an
“emotional” machine to get productivity more productive? Life, however, is not
always about “productivity,” and more to the point, the animates, are expected to
proliferate exactly outside the domain of “productivity” into intimate spheres. So
perhaps animate as “toy” would provide a better set of clues – we’ve alluded to
historical aspects of this above. But here too, while covering a large dimension of
life, play like productivity does not constitute a core to the scope of relational
phenomena that make up a whole human life.
Animate as “totem” or “talisman” might serve better – in the case of the former the
29
David Deacon, Researching Communications: A Practical Guide to Methods in Media and Cultural Analysis
(London: \Oxford University Press, 1999).
30
The comparative approach to media analysis – grounded in a nexus incorporating Innis and Grant as
well as McLuhan -- developed by Angus and still to be noted in the communication research fields, exhibits
rich methodological and especially substantive implications for the assessment of emergent media. For an
application see Ian H. Angus, A Border Within: National Identity, Cultural Plurality, and Wilderness
(Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1997), Ian H. Angus, Primal Scenes of Communication :
Communication, Consumerism, and Social Movements, Suny Series in the Philosophy of the Social
Sciences. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000).

14/39
animate serving as connection to forms of association and identity, in the latter used
as a device to enhance the power and security of the user. Here too we have useful
figures for consideration but not sufficient to answer or address Norman’s question.
Given the rich content animates will either contain or access (the stuff of glittering
moments and precious memories), and with their wide range of functionality,
perhaps we can explore their significance through the figure of “treasure?” Again,
this will be a dimension of what they could become for us, but not all. Because, as
Norman suggests, animates will provide instruction, might they be figured as a sort
of socializing “template,” or “tutor” guiding us through the book-learning phases of
our educations, and then acting as advisors for the rest of our lives?
Perhaps, plagued by many suppliers and poor quality control, noninteroperabilities,

and bogus or flawed upgrades, animates might become a kind of “torment” in the
daily sphere. All of these options are suggestive and confluent, some fertile, but
they refer to inanimate material objects, mainly consumer durables. The indicators
suggest that the animates will probably take a much more active part in our lives
than a mobile phone, piece of personal ornamentation, hammer, personal
conveyance device, or furniture. To achieve the posture toward the animates and
lively stuff embedding and enabling them, that is, as Norman admonishes,
“intelligent about their functionality, use and design,” we will have to approach the
animates with a larger protocol of questions, and one that is more about us than
what things are.
II. US
1.
2.
The indicators driving our conjecture suggest the animates may, within a generation
or two or sooner, but then increasingly, become “interactants31” in intimate, private,
public domains of experience as well as many places and institutional settings of
daily life32. More of us may well find ourselves collaborating with animates at our
31
J Johnson and (Bruno Latour), "Mixing Humans and Non-Humans Together: The Sociology of a Door-
Closer," in Ecologies of Knowledge, ed. S.L. (ed.) Star (State University of New York Press, 1995).
32
Ulf Hannerz, Exploring the City: Inquiries toward an Urban Anthropology (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1980), Daniel Miller, Material Culture and Mass Consumption, Social Archaeology.

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places of work and occupation (where they may ultimately displace most, if not all,
of us from jobs). We will engage with them in the ways we provision and equip our
needs and lives, projects and desires. We can imagine them taking places in the
retail and services sectors. We can be fairly certain that proto-animates will soon
increasingly become aspects of our modes and means of mobility. Animates may
soon become fellow travelers of a sort; GSM, OnStar™, and locational signals
emitted by all mobile phones prefigure this. We’ll also encounter animates as parts
of the relational settings and contexts for what we do and where we go when we’re
out. That they’ll become part of the domestic realm is equally certain at this point –
and will be one of the key entry points both into our lives and places of greatest
cultivation of our relationship with, and through, the animates. We can also safely
conjecture that animates will have roles to play in the neighbourhoods, communities
– localized and imaginary33 -- that matrix our abiding, co-interrelatings and
meanings.
We might think of these five provisional categories as settings, or borrowing from

Mauss, as constituting relational forms similar in structure, dynamics and functions
as the habitus. Marcel Mauss (1872-1950) proposed the term habitus to describe
the cultivated and formative environment made up of things, people and practices
that structure a bawling bundle of raw connation and appetency, solipsistic will and
desire, into a social and cultural being – a “human34.” Specifically the term referred
to the childhood home, the formative domestic cultural and social ecology in which
one learned the rules of social propriety. Just as the habitus is a set of people,
practices and things, so each of the other four here listed, are living aggregates of
things and others, procedures and proprieties. We live in, ever-passing through and
between, these settings.
Thus these settings – dwelling, occupational, communal, market, and mobile – might
provide constituents for a primary protocol within which, and by means of which, to
conjecture the presence of intelligent and emotional machines. We may, by way of
conjecture then ask, how might the animates, or indeed, one species or variety of
animate, condition our comings and goings, expenditures and efforts, attention and
(Oxford, OX, UK ; New York, NY, USA: B. Blackwell, 1987), Edward Tenner, Our Own Devices: The Past
and Future of Body Technology (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003).
33
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism
(London: Verso, 1983).
34
Alphonso Lingis, Excesses: Eros & Culture (Albany: SUNY, 1983).

16/39
purposes in any one or combination of these settings? How might they modulate
experience; which kinds of consciousness and of what might they foster, enable,
attenuate or constrain?
3.
No matter who we are, nor when we’ve been or may be -- we go from here to there,
we work, we have something we call home, we need things and assistance with this
or that, we seek felicitous sociality with others, and where we are is in the midst of
things. We have called these aggregates of people, things and practices settings.
We could further refer to the settings, and with eyes wide open running the risk of
“essentialism,” as constants of the human condition. That they might not encompass
or exhaust all the variations actualized from out of the fertile human social
imagination goes without saying. Yet, in the prospect of the animates arriving holus-
bolus, we need somewhere to begin. For example, a critic might point out that the
five settings will not accommodate situations where we are in virtual world such as
those of games and play. Or another might add that we ought to include a place for
the sacred. Whether there be 5 or 6 settings is moot, what is at issue though is
whether or not we can devise a set of systematic and “intuitively given” categories
enabling us to manageably accommodate as wide a range of data about the human
experience as possible.
If our conjectural systematic inquiry is to get at the substance of Norman’s

questions, we must also engage with content of these settings – that is, we must
describe something of the vital processes within the settings that animates are likely
to mediate. Now, since we speak and inquire of the lively stuff in the form of
animates as media, at this point we can turn to relational orientations, imperatives,
and fields that media enable in all social life. We begin from the human
predicament, as this is simultaneously one’s “own-most” and most “common to all.”
As Donne observed, none of us are islands. By virtue of our social nature we are
oriented to others continually. And others, oriented to us, exert upon us a force as
well – imperatives of various sorts: one’s parents, peers, employers, colleagues,
dependants, and finally the Grim Reaper, all variously and in a multitude of ways
“come to mind,” “occur” or interpellate, command, demand attention.
Relational orientations – part conscious, part unconscious; in parts biological, social,

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and personal; diversely inflected combinations of nature and nurture; shaped by

historical and cultural processes; embodied and cognitive – are deeply ingrained into
us. They affect and orient things we feel, think and do, our relations with people
around us. No less so do they shape how we cultivate and experience our selves and
how we understand what things are for. The orientations, correlates to relational
states and processes -- all emerging from, and generative of, human interactions --
provide the coordinates and political economy of the possible for ways we
experience, articulate and enact will and desire, how we allocate effort and
approportion interests, as well as sense we make of our pasts and the expectations
we mount for the future35.
The broad facts of human life – that we are embodied and must obtain nourishment,
that we live within institutions and seek out sociality and security in the midst or
others, and that each of us experiences a personhood, a self of some kind – are all
force fields. They proffer opportunities, interpellate as imperatives, and are the
constants through which we gauge our fortunes relative to those of others and
assess the depth of our values. Providing us with the coherent set of orientations in
our negotiations and labours constructing shared worlds, the specific content and
inflection of relational constants represent the atmosphere and character or ethos of
our lives.
The precise contours and content of the orientations could only be identified in both
a specific time and place. Nor should we expect to draw hard and fast boundaries
around the orientations. A meal, for example, is proper to which discrete category of
human experience? Is it proper to the fact, facts, or constants of embodiment, need
for nutrition, social construction of both, cultural patterning defining what’s edible by
whom and when? If we are to work in the abstract -- as at this stage of our inquiry
we must -- then we can only provisionally sketch relational fields and their correlate
orientations. We must do something of this sort if we are to have a set of incisive
questions to pose to the animates as media and lively stuff, and the shapes of things
to come.
Thus, in full recognition that what we are calling relational fields be interpenetrant
35
I have appropriated Lingis’ concept of directives to shape the notion of relational fields. Lingis’ issues
are philosophical, ours more modest and pragmatic, the sense that perception is a response to motion in
the world and that we are subject to domains of relevance obtains in both cases, however. See Alphonso
Lingis, The Imperative (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998).

18/39
and provisional, we can still posit three larger domains of orientation and relational
constants – Others, things, and self36. From here, we might devise a set of
questions or protocols based on ranges of control and intimacy – the self-presenting
a domain of greatest intimacy, personal practices and preferences. The domain of
Others is where identities, preferences and practices are negotiated in a muscular
social setting. The domain of things incorporates all that which resists and must be
acted upon, and which despite all else, provides the ground for existence as such as
well as the stuff of sensuous experience fine, foul, and in between.
4.
If we begin from relational fields orienting us to Others, we might ask how the
animates could position and predispose, enable and/or inhibit us, to family? Here we
would include any variety of consanguine kinship or primary relations. Would
animates enliven felicitous family relations, as their prototypical forms and media
already promise to do? Animates could enable continuous monitoring of small
children by parents who may be at work or elsewhere. For example the animate
environment occupied by the child or its familiar child’s could be constantly reading
the child’s vital signs and metabolic processes and reporting any spikes, dips or
irregularities. As children grow up and leave, an animate might be able to re-create
“precious” moments, or perhaps sound a bit like Mom for the first few months of the
adolescent’s initial fight into independence. Might this, in extreme, develop into a
complete absence of independence as parents insist on monitoring their offspring, or
spouses each other? Might the animates strain family and kinship relations, or
perhaps come to subvert, or supplant them37?
It’s not unimaginable that animates might come to play a role in our cults and
observances of our mortality and parting with those who go before us. What would
happen to an animate once (its/their) owner died? Would they become talking
grave-markers38, telling any passerby willing to listen the stories of owners long
done to dust? Might they become “capsules for the dearly departed” able to imitate
the lost one in voice and personalities on demand? In which case, would the beloved
have died? How might this condition our ways of understanding ourselves as
36
The categories are borrowed from Foucault’s discussion of Kant in Michel Foucault, "What Is
Enlightenment?," in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984).
37
JG Ballard plays out a chilling variation on this theme. J.D. Ballard, "Myths of the near Future," in Myths
of the near Future (London: Jonathan Cape, 1982).
38
Gary Gumpert, Talking Tombstones & Other Tales of the Media Age (New York: Oxford University Press,
1987).

19/39
mortals?
Kinship is a primary social environment in which we accede to a name and a face.

We learn “order and ordinance39” as Lingis puts it, and our place in the “bigger
scheme of things.” And in the force field of family we also learn about what is “own”
and “other,” and our first predispositions to the neighbours. How might animates
orient or predispose us to the web of forces that make up neighbouring – a constant
incorporating not only the neighbour across the fence, but the one across the
boundary. We learn the play of interests, powers and positions in the primary
environment in the midst of family; among neighbours we learn its name is politics.
The neighbour and we have something in common, always. Be it a fence, a border,

a pasture, a well. But we rarely have everything in common – we cooperate and
compete, and we strive to make reality congenial to our own ends – good news if it
accommodates the neighbours. If not, we negotiate, maneuver, build coalitions with
other neighbours and kinsfolk, and if all that fails, we proceed and deal with the
consequences, affirming Clauswitz’ famous dictum about war being politics
conducted by other means. What kind of effect could animates have in the political
sphere? Would they reflect the political orientations of their “owners?” Should they
have a public sphere of their own? Or would putting emotional capability into them
lead to them desiring a political agenda of their own, having learned the language of
emancipation and freedom as the greatest good from their masters40? Might they
hold elected office or act in proxy for an ill leader, or occupy any public post? If they
get to be smart enough to displace us from our jobs and benignly manage our lives,
why not the nation state?
How could the presence of intelligent and emotional machines affect how we
interrelate within and with institutions? For example, what roles for animates in our
legal systems? What legal status might they have? Would they be entitled to
rights41? Could animates own anything or enter into contractual relations either
39
Lingis, The Imperative.
40
Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism.
41
In a recent examination of the question Soskis writes:
“At some point in the not-too-distant future, we might actually face a sentient, intelligent machine who
demands, or who many come to believe deserves, some form of legal protection. The plausibility of this
occurrence is an extremely touchy subject in the artificial intelligence field, particularly since overoptimism
[sic] and speculation about the future has often embarrassed the movement in the past.” See, Benjamin
Soskis, Man and the Machines (January-February) [Website] (Legalaffairs.Org, 2005 [cited 27 December
2004]); available from http://www.legalaffairs.org/email/email.html?articleid=686.

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themselves or as proxies? Might they be given power of attorney by or for their

disabled or infirm owners? From another point of view, would everyone have a right
to do whatever pleased to and with an intelligent and emotional machine? In our
society we abhor cruelty to animals albeit living with various kinds. Would there be
a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animates in the future? Runaway animates
and an underground railway: where to in an age of GPS? While it is possible that in
the future we might have cause to extend compassion to the things we’ve made, we
may also pause to consider that these will be powerful machines, and extensions of
ourselves and servants of our wills. We regulate firearms, will we regulate animates
too?
Not all our institutions have to do with the law – indeed the nuclear family is a social
institution. So are the forms of education we provide the young, as are festivals and
holidays of various kinds. Many institutions provide a concrete basis for our cultures
and senses of what is true, good, and beautiful. Might this lively stuff come to
influence our aesthetic codes and arts, as well as how we value these institutions and
practices42? Already tools for media production are becoming a common feature on
many PCs. The keyboard has displaced chirography as a daily medium, will the
animates displace or condition our creativity and cultures of its expression? How
might they shape our relation to theatre, films, poetry, dance, performance and the
arts?
How might the animates affect or change our ideas about wealth, resources and
exchange? So far as the animates are concerned, would there be a basic model
coming as birthright and then levels of peripherals and performativities to
demonstrate invidious distinction, or might they make such a comparison obsolete?
We can’t imagine animates being cheap to either make or allocate. For example, in
2004 Japanese master robotocist Mitsuo Kawato estimated that if provided $500
million a year for 30 years, he could produce a robot (note, a robot, not an animate)
with the intellect and capabilities of a five-year old child 43. With this in mind, might
the animates build the final insurmountable wall separating the global the haves and
have-nots? So we could ask: How could, would, should animates mediate wealth,
42
Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mass Reproduction," in Illuminations, ed. Hannah
Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1969), John A Walker, Art in the Age of Mass Media, 3 ed. (London: Pluto,
2001).
43
Gregory T Huang, What We Can Learn from Computers [Website] (MIT Technology Review.Com,
December, 2004 2005 [cited 31 December 2004]); available from
http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/01/issue/huang0105.asp.

21/39
resources, access? On the other hand, might the fact of their chameleon-like nature,
projected capacity for natural language interfaces, and need to exist in small
portable platforms, do away with the digital divide?
How might the animates condition how we approach wealth, satisfaction and satiety
with and in possessions and powers, and what we imagine and enact as minimum
resource standards of social decency? The Barbie Doll, observed Hine, was not a toy
but a didactic device for teaching pre-pubescent girls to equate young adulthood,
glamour, fashion and consumption. Barbie, in effect, was and a remains a 3d
advertisement44. And the animates? If we can build appliances that burn out
solenoids right on cue after X hours of operation rendering them inoperable and
irreparable due to cost of labour relative cost of a new appliance45, what then of
animates? How could the animates affect global flows of capital? If, as is surely
possible in such a scenario, that nearly all human jobs and avocations are displaced
to animates – who will buy all the lively stuff, never mind the inert goods and staples
of old?
Individually vulnerable creatures at best, we cleave to others and simultaneously

crave security -- the sense that we, our world with its order and ordinances,
relevances and relations, will be continuous and free of fear, violation, rough
treatment, dispossession, or assault. The orientation to security is already being
colonized by proto-animates – witness the proliferation of home security or elderly-
monitoring systems that are connected to centralized communication nodes
themselves often in distant cities? Already proto-animates are being developed for
military and policing roles46. Are we prepared for intelligent killing machines and
networks 47? From a different perspective, might proxy armies come to replace real
44
Thomas Hine, Populuxe (New York: Knopf, 1987).
45
Ralph Caplan, By Design: Why There Are No Locks on the Bathroom Doors in the Hotel Louis Xiv, and
Other Object Lessons (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1982).
46
Noah Shachtman, More Robot Grunts Ready for Duty (WIRED News, 2004 [cited 02:00 AM Dec. 01, PT
2004]); available from http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,65885,00.html.
47
The First International Symposium on Roboethics, identified four areas of concern, first among them the
ethics of robotic weaponry. The conference listed as areas of attention:
The ethics of robotic violence, killing and hunting machines, remote weapons, killing fields and networks;
the ethics of implants [Cyborg technologies], remote sensing through and control of people and animals;
the ethics of the user in interface: the user’s competence (mental, physical,) in command and control of
powerful semiautonomous technologies; and finally, the ethics of the socialization, instruction and
humanization of robots.
See: Bruce Sterling, Robots and the Rest of Us [Website] (Conde Nast, 2004 [cited December 2004]);
available from http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.05/view.html?pg=4?tw=wn_tophead_7..

22/39
ones turning war into a kind non-lethal mechanical ballet-cum-chess game48? Could
laws regulating speed of automobile travel be built into animates regulating cars like
mechanical regulators of old and thereby prevent the vehicle from exceeding speed
limits? Better yet, might the animate allow the speeding but automatically issue a
ticket for the infraction. Could OnStar™ fink? Might law enforcement be built into
shipments and storage facilities to “guard and protect” – robocops on chips?
5.
Things
There is a sense in which our whole conjectural enterprise here is an extension or
elaboration of this category, because the lively stuff is, after all, part of our material
culture. We might begin with the body. Not-me/me at my ownmost, when visited
by ailments or fatigue, it becomes obdurate and a burden49. It likes things my
reasoning mind knows are bad for me, and it and it is capable of embarrassing me
through its unruliness, needs and functions. As age sets in, it changes bringing
about a different sense of who I am to me. It is the seat of many of my pleasures
and the place of many pains and limitations, most private haven, and when fatigued,
inflicted, anguished, the most inescapable horror.
A wide range of questions open, some are being mapped, particularly the
implications of the Cyborg – that entity that straddles us and the animates50. There
are other questions too: Transbodiment and remote effective presence, or
“teleffectiveness.” How might such teleffectiveness and remote sensing condition
our sense of embodiment, location, and the nature of Others? Indicators also
suggest enablement of multipresence, being at two events at the same time: This
too? Does this lead to a new distributed panopticon – a variation on McLuhan’s
48
One has to doubt that this will be a “robowars” scenario, more likely this will not be a match between
animate warriors, but rather their deployment in search and destroy missions against urban fighters and
insurgents, to enforce occupations, peace treaties and so on. For robotics and automation in war see: De
Landa, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (New York: Swerve Editions, 1991). For the future of war
and weapon systems see: Gwynne Dyer, War: The New Edition (Toronto: Random House, 2004), Robert
L O'Connell, Ride of the Second Horseman: The Birth & Death of War (New York: Oxford University Press,
1995), Robert L. O'Connell, Of Arms and Men: A History of War, Weapons, and Aggression (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1989). TALON, a robotic armed device currently in deployment seems like the
perfect device for super powers in the savage dirty little wars that McLuhan, from his vantage point of the
late 60s, conjectured for our world. See Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, War and Peace in the Global
Village; an Inventory of Some of the Current Spastic Situations That Could Be Eliminated by More
Feedforward, 1st -- ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968).
49
Drew Leder, The Absent Body (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990)., and Elaine Scarry, The
Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).
50
Donna Jeanne Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Free
Association Books, 1991).

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nasty nosey global village (straight out of Miss Marples, but multicultural and even
more malevolent) 51? What might it mean to have haptic or tactile interface through
a remote animate52. Would continuous compliance, attention, undying devotion
(providing the batteries last) and having all our needs cared for, lead to a
generalization of sloth, indolence, arrogance, and ennui these then encouraging
bizarre entertainments, exploitative behaviours and . . .? And finally, what effect of
this lively stuff on Death, what we think it to be, how we approach it, how we live in
its presence? When you die, will your animate be terminated like some sacrificial
funerary victim? Or will we finally achieve a virtual immortality by delegate our
living to them while we take the Big Nap?
Among the things central to experience is our embodied need and love of
sustenance. We can build a culture around something as humble as roots and
berries or as complex and rarified as haute cuisine. Historian Fernandez-Armesto
shows that alimentary culture has played a profound and generative role in the
history of our species, our cultures, institutions and imaginations53. What should we
expect to be the conditioning effects of our lively stuff on our relation to each other
through the media of food and drink, our orientations to it? How might animate
communication ecologies condition our experiences of the sources and practices of
provisioning and cultures of preparation, of distribution and access, and of the
meaning of food and nutrition? What if an animate could prepare a favourite dish as
only a parent could? New media, says Peters, are always devices for raising the
dead 54. Would we have the urge to break bread with animates?
Needful things, or material culture, is large category and encompasses everything

people make or select from nature – from transcontinental power grids to grid-like
hatching on a piece of ochre from 70,000 years ago55. Indications are that when the
51
Often misinterpreted as McLuhan’s utopian village of continuous and reciprocal communication, the
global village was to be anything but. See: Marshall McLuhan, "Playboy Interview," Canadian Journal of
Communication (1989), Marshall McLuhan et al., Letters of Marshall Mcluhan (Toronto: Oxford University
Press Canada, 1987).
52
Philip Ball, Robot Finger Has Feeling: Artificial Muscle Feels the Weight of Objects It Moves [Website]
(Nature Science Update, 2003 [cited 27 May 2003]); available from http://www.sci-
con.org/archive/200304.html.
53
Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Near a Thousand Tables: A History of Food (Toronto, ON: Key Porter,
2002). With respect to eating and both our imaginations and conceptions of power, see the invaluable
discussions provided by Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power, trans. Carol Stewart (London: Penguin, 1962).
54
John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1999).
55
. David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origin of Art (New York: Thames
& Hudson, 2002)..

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animates begin to spread, this will involve their proliferation through material culture
from substances to artefacts as their prototypes already have56, and to aggregates
and environments where we have also met their rudimentary forms.
We say needful things but the phrase clearly can be read both ways – that it’s the
things that do the needing too -- what then will the animates need from us, from
each other? McLuhan insisted that each technology will generate a service
environment, what sort of infrastructure would the animates require, what kind of
environment would they create? And, as the key question in AI puts it: If we make
a machine that is capable of virtually or actually loving us, then are we obliged to
love it back? If the animates become granular and self-organizing, capable of
learning, lifelike and able to replicate themselves, how to understand them as a part
of an inert and obdurate materiality57? How are we to understand this very odd
transformation? What sort of reified animation or animated reification could this be?
Which life is devoid of its chores and ordeals? Writ larger, these include calamities,
disasters, catastrophes, loss and tragedy. In the miniscule (though no less
meaningful for all that), myriad irritations, frustrations and discomforts of life beset
us, each objective, painful, and no less thingly, obdurate, burdensome. Chores and
ordeals are where our orientations shade quickly into imperatives – where we can
see that economy between “could,” “ought or should,” and “must” -- at its most
sharply defined. Chores and ordeals issue from Ananake, the ancient Greek goddess
of Necessity: The circumstances and imperatives out of our immediate if any
control, regardless of whose making or their provenance; those things which must be
overcome, worked with or through, sometimes endure and survive, and sometimes
not58. Natural disasters, wars, famine, bureaucracies run amok, epidemics, traffic
jams, poverty, lingering and debilitating sickness, an infinity of injustices large and
small, financial mishap – these all potentially lie in “wait” around life’s next corner.
56
Michael Singer, Smart Dust Collecting in the Enterprise (Internetnews.Com, 2003 [cited 28 December
2004]); available from siliconvalley.internet.com/news/article.php/3098551.
57
Christopher Meyer and Karl Jacob Jason Lohn, Dick Morley, Shana Ting Lipton, Marco Dorigo, Avery
Pennarun, Living Machines (WIRED, 2004 [cited 9 February 2004]); available from
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.02/machines_pr.html.
58
It is a comment on the ancient patriarchal Greek order that the only force to which Zeus, masculine
principle par excellence, had to bend both will and knee and know anxiety, was embodied in “a slight girl.”
Ananke’s sister Nemesis or “Retribution,” also in the Greek imagination a slight beautiful girl but of a
serious and somewhat sorrowful demeanor, often attended upon Necessity. She also commanded the
respect or Zeus and the entire Olympic clan. Roberto Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony
(Toronto: A. A. Knopf Canada, 1993), Robert Graves, Greek Myths (New York: George Braziller, 1957),
Robert Graves and Grevel Lindop, The White Goddess : A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth (Manchester:
Carcanet, 1997).

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As we get older we orient to these, feel their barb -- we buy insurance and RRSPs,
adopt healthier lifestyles, learn new cultures of
precautionary measures. Will the animates be exactly elements of such
precautionary measures: security guards, epi-medics, intelligence gatherers,
cognoscenti and fixers in their own ways?
How could animates mediate our orientation to the imperatives of ordeals and
chores? Which chores and ordeals might be “obsolesced,” as McLuhan put it in his
four-fold laws of media? McLuhan’s question about obsolescence is here most apt: a
significant part of their marketer’s pitch will be the promise of making many
irritations and perhaps sources of some deeper life-traumas obsolete. From
McLuhan’s point of view, obsolescence was not a finality, but a transitional state.
Another of the four laws posits that innovations precipitate processes of cultural
“recovery” or “retrieval” in addition to doing away with an irritant and providing
“solutions.” Which kinds of calamities, chores or ordeals might the animates then
revisit upon us? Where would we look to find out? Which anxieties, done away with
in times past by previous technological “solutions,” could lively stuff reintroduce into
our lives?
Our values and beliefs have an objective, “thingly” character; they are, of a sort first
and last things. Our values and beliefs are intermeshed with larger frameworks of
belief and cultural pattern we learn from or have disciplined into us in our habitus
and surrounding world. Nor is that intermesh always one of harmony or accord.
These things – beliefs, values, stories, practices, rituals, images, buildings – frame
life and, when rich and given as authentic to experience, provide a fine ameliorative
and source of heartening; in their absence or attenuation we begin the slow dance
into ennui and depression. What role for the animates in this relational constant and
force field?
How would the animates embody our values; how could they not? Would they
reassure us in our values? How would they go about doing this? Surely if Teddy is
to be a lifetime friend, teacher, mentor and guardian angel, then s/he/it be should
“tuned” into whatever the owner/user finds worth “going to the wall” for? If Teddy
is to be all these things, who would program the value-set -- the comprehension of
the order and ordinance of some things, of those relations, people, states and things

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substantial and impossible to exhaust -- into the machine’s “mind 59?” If we’re not
just a little edgy about what TV, electronic games, the Internet and all the
commercial content are “teaching the kids today,” what should we expect when
teaching comes from an affective, patient, savvy 3D machine that’s interactive,
ambulatory, rich media-enabled, networked, commercial, and always on to a
virtually infinite range of information, data, entertainment and interpellation?
As with all the orientations and imperatives or constants of diaposon of human

relational possibilities, material culture frames and socially positions a user, an
“owner” of some kind, “a self.” Our conjectural protocol of questions should also
enable us to inquire into this sphere of experience and orientation. We could, for
example, begin by asking how the animates might impact, nuance, condition or
affect our sense and cultivations of personhood?
6.
Self
The rhetorical strategy of the makers of the proto-animates60 is decidedly aimed at
an affective, interested, acquisitive, socially embedded, cognitive, appetent,
communicative self (equipped with appropriate resources or institutional access). If
we’re reading the signs right – the language is certainly there – the animates will
enter our lives precisely as intimate technologies61, and aimed directly into the
domain of personhood. By personhood, we could understand an intensely
communicative and social, relational, mediated, and layered self, a human with
birthright to a face, a name, and place. Animates as associates, intimates,
extensions of an appetitive and conative self, would surely figure in how our sense of
personhood – our own and that others – could develop. For example, how might
they shape our conceptions of gender and its expressions and cultures? Would
animates be gendered, sexed, neither, either? In which dimensions could they
shape the ways we present ourselves to others and join the social dramaturgy that
59
A counterpoint: Borgmann & things focal with Csikszentmihalyi & things that mattered. Albert
Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life: A Philosophical Inquiry (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1984), Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Halton, The Meaning of
Things: Domestic Symbols and the Self (Cambridge, Mss: University of Chicago Press, 1981).
60
The rudimentary forms of animates – AIBO, industrial robots, security environments, self-encrypting
systems and so on.
61
This quite probably even as they are being imposed on us as institutional emanations and operatives.

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enables living with others62?
If the animates are to be the mediators of childrearing and then companions, then
some of the challenges before their makers can be drawn from Norman’s “Teddy”
article. Norman, a cognitive psychologist, points out that Teddy’s interactions with
us would have to tread a delicate line between encouragement and criticism63.
Continuous encouragement – positive feedback – would be hazardous as it leads to
what amounts to suicidal arrogance. Continuous criticism would be debilitating.
How fine a level of language comprehension (in a multilingual world), situational
awareness, learning ability, affective receptivity, and perceptiveness would be
required of a machine for this kind of performance? How many computations a
nanosecond? Technological “unobtainiums” notwithstanding, one has to pause at the
thought of an object knowing you well enough to know when to push which of your
buttons. What would happen if you lost it? If it was “bot-napped,” hijacked,
hacked? Anyone who has lost an address book, laptop or cell phone knows what
that feels like; now imagine something even more – no, most, intimate. How might
that impact one’s sense of personhood?
A self is always a self among and with others. We may be familied and live amongst
neighbours, with whom we may have hale or unhappy congress, but we also choose
-- and are chosen -- uniting into dyads and groups, networks of companions, friends,
mates. How might the animates shape our senses of, practices, and orientations to
conviviality, to friends, fellowship and companions? Or, might the animates put a
whole new dimension to parasocial relations into play64? Who needs humans that
are unreliable when Teddy always knows best anyway65? And what if Teddy could
“be” or share in some significant personality characteristics or qualities of your
favourite star from your favourite soap or show, movie or game, novel or other
cultural artefact? Of a lost friend? Or the friend you wished for and never had? On
arrival at ELIZA’s site the “supplicant” is greeted with a white page, a question field
62
Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (New York: Harper & Row,
1974), Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Doubleday Anchor Books ; A174.
(Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1959).
63
Norman, Turn Signals Are the Facial Expressions of Automobiles.
64
The “parasocial” refers to an imaginary relationship that audiences believe they have with a “persona”
or personality seen in the Media. We are using the term here, rather unorthodoxly, to cover any number
of imaginary relations with other social entities – persons, groups and institutions.
65
Ursula M. Franklin, The Real World of Technology, Rev. ed., C B C Massey Lecture Series. (Toronto,
Ont.: Anansi, 1999).

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under text in bold 36 point proclaiming, “ELIZA - a friend you could never have
before66.”
The literature on play grows continuously as various forms of gaming become bigger
and bigger businesses. Play, games, and means we use to escape the everyday self
into various alternative states of experience, context and consciousness are as much
a relational possibilities and imperatives as might be productivity67. In any of the
play modalities described by Caillois -- vertiginous, risk-taking, imitative, or
competitive -- which roles, and for which, of the animates68? Might the animates
finally usher in the perfect unity of pedagogy and play long sought by educators and
especially cost-conscious administrators69?
In a recent study of the origins of cave art, Lewis-Williams reminds us that the will to
ecstatic states appears to be universal human orientation, though its practices,
intensities and content, personal and social valuation and interpretations are culture-
specific70. Some by substance, some by dance and still others through meditation or
intense exertion – we find many ways to manifest and feed that will. How might the
animates condition, play to, or on it? Which shapes might this lively stuff take when
combined with the will to escape the self? If they are to be teachers of the young
and intimates through life, might they also take on shamanic, therapeutic, cathartic,
confessional, purifying roles? What might that look like? What might that mean?
One of the great attractions of the animates will be in their play to and realization of
our preferences and tastes. Tastes and preferences can be a powerful orientation
bending other relational possibilities to the a logic its own; “the heart has its
reasons.” If Nietzsche’s to be believed, and perhaps his guess is as good as
anyone’s, preferences and tastes of an ancestor or ancestral group account for much
of cultural diversity71. We live, as McCracken observes, in an age of cultural
66
http://www-ai.ijs.si/eliza-cgi-bin/eliza_script
67
Roger Caillois, Man, Play, and Games, trans. Meyer Barash (New York: Free Press, 1961), James F.
Hans, The Play of the World (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981), Johan Huizinga, Homo
Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture, trans. translator not given (Boston: Beacon Press, 1950),
Lingis, Excesses: Eros & Culture..
68
Caillois, Man, Play, and Games.
69
Chandra Mukerji, From Graven Images: Patterns of Modern Materialism (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1983), Erik Strommen, B. J., "Interactive Toy Characters as Interfaces for Children," in Information
Appliances and Beyond: Interaction Design for Consumer Products, ed. Eric Bergman (San Francisco:
Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 2000).
70
Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origin of Art.
71
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche et al., The Gay Science: With a Prelude in German Rhymes and an Appendix
of Songs, Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

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plenitude, and identity-group experimentation and speciation72. How would the lively
stuff accommodate or realize tastes? Which ones? What if someone preferred to
menace people with their animates? In a small world, one fellow’s preferences may
be the source of another’s homicidal rage. Might the animates, changeable and
compliant, orient us not only in, but to an ethics and political economy of preference,
taste, personal expressions, experiments with and experiences.
How might the animates impact on personal expressions of institutional and cultural
ornamental and comportmental codes? Might they obsolesce the knapsack, briefcase
and handbag? How could they impact on our capacity for mimesis, our will to
cosmeisis and effects on us of the aesthetic imperative73, comply with them? a of
customized animate envelopment and self-presentation – for it would be an
envelopment by presences, in environments intelligent and filled with lively stuff and
a mobile extensions of them and it as part of daily kit.
A speculative species, we are given over to curiosity, conjecture, learning and

knowledge – perhaps, along with language than enables them – the adaptive
advantage of the species. As Innis has demonstrated, knowledge and media are
linked 74. By way of a seeming tautology, how might the animates condition our
expectation, definitions and practices by which we know what we do, the ways we
enact citizenship, participation and access in an age of mediation of daily life by
animates as media? We may distinguish between two forms of media – explicit and
There is an interesting resonance here in the organizational communication literature, particularly Wieck’s
observations on the relationship between practice and the articulation of mission statement, with the
former regularly, if counter-intuitively, preceding the latter. See: K.E. Weick, "Sensemaking in
Organizations: Small Structures with Large Consequences.," in Making Sense of the Organization.
(Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2001), Karl E. Weick, Making Sense of the Organization
(Oxford, UK ; Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2001).
72
Grant David McCracken, Plenitude, ed. Grant David McCracken, Culture by Commotion; Book 1.
(Toronto: Periph.:Fluide, 1997).
73
Comportment refers to the way in which we carry and present ourselves – in has to do with bearing,
posture, attitude as well as clothing and grooming. Ornament could be seen as content or vocabulary of
this larger material “discourse” of the self. This appears to be a universal structure. See Daniel Miller,
Material Culture and Mass Consumption, Ted Polhemus, Body Styles (Luton, Beds: Lennard Pub. in
association with Channel Four Television Co., 1988). For a suggestive discussion of the aesthetic
imperative in broad, contemporary and particularly polemical contexts see: Virginia Postrel, The
Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture & Consciousness
(New York: Harper Collins, 2003), Penny Sparke, As Long as It's Pink: The Sexual Politics of Taste
(London ; San Francisco, Calif.: Pandora, 1995).
74
Harold Innis, The Bias of Communication (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1952), Harold Adams
Innis and Dave Godfrey, Empire & Communications, Rev. ed. (Victoria, B.C.: Press Porcépic, 1986), and
also the recent intellectual biography by Paul Heyer, Harold Innis, Critical Media Studies. (Lanham, Md.:
Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), Harold Innis, The Bias of Communication (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1952), Harold Adams Innis and Dave Godfrey, Empire & Communications, Rev. ed. (Victoria, B.C.:
Press Porcépic, 1986).

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implicit75. “Implicit media” are those elements of our material culture that are meant
to serve purposes outside or beyond what we normally think of as communication.
Their forms, colours, and physical properties are a subtle medium for social
communication76. “Explicit media” on the other hand refers to those elements of
material culture that are produced solely to convey messages – radios, books,
posters, telephones etc. To be sure, the two categories are not mutually exclusive:
for example, the sculptural form of a TV “says” something about it and designers
regularly incorporate explicit media by using text and readily accessible symbols,
word-marks and logotypes on many of the things that are produced. The animates
would completely integrate the two categories producing something of a
gesamtkunstwerk. How could this affect or shape our orientation to communication?
To knowledge” “To what left of your pitiful mnemonic abilities?” one can almost hear
Plato’s Socrates saying 77.
As media explicit – that is as things that send and receive – as well as implicit media
– what roles might animates play in our lives? We are oriented to knowing and
communicating, to telling, expounding, showing, demonstrating, remonstrating,
representing. How might such media affect our ability to express what we know,
interrogate what we find suspicious, investigate what spurs our attention, share what
we learn and need to know, negotiate equitable relations within the political
economies of knowledge, and to listen and hear what matters in our communication
circumstances and ecologies? How might they improve on our abilities? Or, again to
return to McLuhan’s “laws,” how might the animates become “too much of a good
thing?” Might they reverse the benefit as we push them to the peak of their
technical form? When they push us to our communicative and cognitive capacities?
Will access be an entitlement, or a sentence? Will we be able to off-load an
evermore “schizophrenic” world (to borrow from Baudrillard 78) or need continuous
upgrades to ward-off interpellation through every new conduit to the world the
75
Roman Onufrijchuk, First Things First (Centre for Policy Research on Science and Technology, 2005
[cited January 2005]); available from http://arago.cprost.sfu.ca/cmns804/.
76
Richard Buchanan, "Declaration by Design: Rhetoric, Argument, and Demonstration in Design Practice,"
in Design Discourse: History/Theory/Criticism, ed. Victor Margolin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1989), Richard. Buchanan, "Design and the New Rhetoric: Productive Arts in the
Philosophy of Culture.," in Philosophy and Rhetoric, ed. Gerard A. Hauser (2001).
77
Eric Alfred Havelock, The Muse Learns to Write: Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the
Present (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), Eric Alfred Havelock, Preface to Plato, History of the
Greek Mind ; V.1. (Cambridge: Belknap P. Harvard U.P., 1963), Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy : The
Technologizing of the Word, New Accents. (London ; New York: Methuen, 1982).
78
Jean Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication, trans. Caroline Schultze (New York: Semiotexte,
1987).

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animates might offer?
Our knowledge of the world, dependent on media and communication practices, is

first received from our primary caregivers – usually families and parents. We have
already pointed out the importance accorded to the habitus and the role played in it
by family, nuclear and extended. How long before the child, caught up in a loop of
“why, and why, and why . . .,” and having repeatedly been referred to its Teddy,
stops asking the parent in the first place? Does this role, like the role of the
extended family in primary education, become obsolete, and parenting as it’s defined
with it? If knowledge is something we learn so that it can be with us “ready to hand”
in Heidegger’s language, then why learn anything at all if Teddy is there all the time?
Might we off load, or “deputize” the lively stuff to knowing for us, on our behalf?
We are oriented to rest and respite no less than to commotion, communication and
community. While play is always active, our orientation to rest adheres to the
private, the self-enclosed, -- perhaps to a therapeutic solipsism and meditative
pottering, messing, snoozing, dozing and lazing, hanging out and farting about – in
other words, to license and, as Chesterton put it, the right to be left alone79. If, as
the Ancient Greeks suggested, interaction (cohabitation) with one’s animates
adheres the golden mean, might they enable deeper reflection, flow states, encasing
us in a restorative “cone of silence?” Might they become a cocoon, a final and
excellent denial of the inevitable need for cooperation and redemptive conflict Buber
accords to living with others80? And how might the animates mediate our need for
and experience of rest and respite, for these can be declined or attenuated as can
any orientation. Indeed, how might the lively stuff affect how we think and what
counts as either, rest or respite? How could they position our expectations of what
entitlement of rest or relief from communicating be accorded others, to the limits to
our apparently insatiable desire to connect?
Teddy, suggests Norman, would accompany us from toddler to tomb. How would the
lively stuff, of which (of whom?) Teddy’s the cute and cuddly “top of the iceberg,”
condition our personal, cultural, and social views about the “temporality” and
“fatality” of lifecourse. If every heart has it reasons, so also its seasons. Would the
79
Witold Rybczynski, Waiting for the Weekend (New York, N.Y., U.S.A.: Viking, 1991)..
80
Martin Buber and Asher Biemann, The Martin Buber Reader: Essential Writings (New York: Palgrave,
2002).

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animates affect how we understand the meaning of the stages of our own lives or
those of others? How might our understandings about and attitudes toward age and
aging be mediated? How could this shape social policy and practice? Would our
notions and expectations of childhood and, as already suggested, practices child-
rearing change? Will a child’s Teddy have all the functionalities of an adult’s? Would
levels of functionality need rating, as are TV, movies and games? If, as the
consensus of projections emphasizes, “carebots” for the elderly are one of the key
innovation drivers, then how might they redefine what, who, and “for what,” the
elderly are and how they ought be disposed within our societies?
Ending the survey we might note that the difference between surviving and living is
in the degree to which life’s climate is felicitously accommodating of what matters --
to our projects and passions. If first and last things – values – create a climate for
the meaningful in life, projects are its concrete and pragmatic manifestations. Work,
our jobs, our vocations, families, sailing around the world, getting through today,
can all be sources of, sites for, and projects themselves. The orientation to
meaningful engagement with the world can turn any of the other orientations or
aspects of them into projects or a Project; witness the role of family in some
communities. Orientation to the realization of some purpose or project – to expand,
to enable, to elaborate, enlighten, ensure, explain, escape – provide the calloused
proofs for the “reasons why” on those “dark nights of the soul.” In which modes and
by what means will the animates enable projects and feed passions? Would
everyone, regardless of projects potential or previous, be entitled to powerful and
intelligent technologies to help realize any project they can dream up? How would
we regulate? How might the animates alter or condition what we take to be valid or
valuable projects? Could they, and our relations with them, become projects and
passions too?
We arrive at a set of “points of departure,” sites from which to begin to survey the
possible topography ahead. This protocol, modeled on the human circumstance, its
relational constants and their correlate settings, orientations, and imperatives is
incomplete and provisional and might itself be quickly under revision when (and if)
the animates arrive. We have outlined something of five settings – occupation,
dwelling, market, mobility and community. We night note that whether festive,
religious, ceremonial occasions and settings in the five categories supplied is a

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question requiring further inquiry. The three sets of orientations may not cover the
complete range of communication and mediational phenomena in which we can
reasonably expect the animates to participate, but does provide a set of coordinates.
Others, we’d suggested, included kinship, neighbouring, institutions, resources and
exchange, and security. The domain of things we populated with the body,
sustenance, material culture, chores and ordeals, and values. For the self we listed
personhood, conviviality and fellowship, play and alternate states, preferences,
lifecourse, knowledge and media, rest and respite, and projects and passions.
In each case many questions, certainly far more than what has been sketched here,
present themselves as we begin to wonder about the implications of potential
collaboration with, mastery over and perhaps the friendship of intelligent, emotional
and marvelous machines – extensions of ourselves.
III. CODA
1.
We might find ourselves wondering what, if any of this warrants any expenditure of
effort at research or serious consideration. After all, the indicators also suggest that
full-blown animates are far off and for now coping with one’s smart phone, PC and
VCR still remain main issues on the agenda. Menzel and D’Aluisio in their luxurious
photo study of “Robosapien” the emergent “new species” are at pains to disabuse
the reader of popcult fantasies. While some of the developments they cite are very
promising, uncanny and entertaining, they point out that “on a good day” and in the
lab, most the machines they visited could do what they had been reported as doing –
usually with blankets of attention and TLC provided by cohorts of attendants81. Truly
the animates are far off in the future. But their proto-types are not, and under the
selective and instrumental pressures of our collaborations with each other and them,
it would be foolish to expect them to cease evolving. Norman’s questions about
Teddy’s future and what it means to us remain open.
At the outset we evoked McLuhan’s method for conjecture sampling something of its
procedural and conceptual regimen as we worked our way through the inquiry. Why
McLuhan’s? Rarely has a communication scholar been more concerned with
81
Peter Menzel and Aith D'Aluisio, Robosapiens: Evolution of a New Species (Cambridge, MSS: MIT Press,
2000).

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identifying an effective and muscular means of conjecturing the future than

McLuhan. The motivations were various, but among them the therapeutic, or more
correctly the prognostic in its medical usage, daemon was pronounced 82. A brilliant
orator, steeped in poetry and broad erudition, his associative and hermeneutic
genius continues to amaze, befuddle, frustrate and inspire. But his method, as a
research strategy for a comprehensive rather than an incisive picture of things to
come, leaves us wanting. McLuhan arrived a tool that was a far better “spur83” to
provoke than a brush to limn the broad field or relational possibilities and constants,
orientations and imperatives whence emerged the unattended and unforeseen
consequences of new technologies against which the “Sage of Wychwood Park”
warned 84.
McLuhan’s contribution to a systematic conjecturing of the implications of the

animates cannot, nor should it be, overlooked. The combined elements of his
“method” -- historical grounding (sporadic, selective and sometimes loosely
interpretive), an insistence on the “subliminal” effects of any context, a profound
grasp of the organizing principles of thought implied by a thorough knowledge of the
rhetorical tradition, and the theorization of transformational patterns and the
transitional nature of culturally and technologically achieved “solutions” -- could
provide us with a useful method by which to inquire in each of the relational fields
and settings, however. What is more, the tetrad presents us with a set of first
principles. Simultaneously we are alerted by the occasional sloppiness with
indicators and evidence as well as by the frequent flights of brilliant but
insupportable insight, that a ballast or corrective are required. Zetetics of the sort
accepted by social science could allow a healthy skepticism to balance the
enthusiasm and oracular “visioning” – that is if we are able by these means to
describe, classify, compare and evaluate communication and mediation phenomena
with the rigor required for circumspect conjecture. And it is exactly a circumspect
conjecturing Norman asks of us.
82
See: Robert E. Babe, Canadian Communication Thought: Ten Foundational Writers (Toronto: University
of Toronto, 2000). And Charles Norris Cochrane, Thucydides and the Science of History (London: Oxford
University Press Humphrey Milford, 1929). For the motivational bundle, W. Terrence Gordon, Marshall
Mcluhan: Escape into Understanding, a Biography (Toronto: Stoddart, 1997), Philip Marchand, Marshall
Mcluhan: The Medium and the Messenger (Toronto: Random House, 1989), Marshall McLuhan, Eric
McLuhan, and Jacek Szlarek, The Medium and the Light: Reflections on Religion (Toronto: Stoddart,
1999), McLuhan et al., Letters of Marshall Mcluhan, Stephanie McLuhan and David Staines, eds.,
Understanding Me: Lectures and Interviews (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2003).
83
Jacques Derrida and Stefano Agosti, Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles = Eperons: Les Styles De Nietzsche, 1st
American ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979).
84
Marchand, Marshall Mcluhan: The Medium and the Messenger.

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2.
The arrival of the animates, even in their current prototypical and imaginary forms,
requires something of us and our “field” such as never before. We must articulate a
set of first principles for a systematic study of our media, things and technologies on
the human scale. After years of intense (and well-funded) research, the “user”
remains an enigma. The actual motivators of consumers fugitive, and we all arrive at
not really knowing for sure. Even the thing seems to be solid and fluid, and much as
suggested by the theorizing of the 70s, it continues to morph fragmenting into
options, packages, miniature advances on sometimes barely useful applications.
Advancements, far more significant and truly full of beans proceed apace as well. A
systematic inquiry of their conjectural and plausible effects will be a critical tool on
the way to evaluating whether these things, animates, lively stuff and loveable
Teddy, a plausible for our ethos and such as would bequeath to those who come.
At any rate, with Norman, and with no capitulation planned or asked, the
technological imperative, supported by the other push and pull play of forces shaping
technological evolution, continue to unfold. Regardless of interventions to the
contrary, it is plenty clear that we will continue to “humanize,” and perhaps
“huminate” our devices and machines. We are in need of such a study, if not for the
purpose of critical assessment, then to the end of making our mechanical universe
while becoming more animate, more humane. How, otherwise, could we teach
animates our fields of relevances, priorities and meanings? Some kind of applied
protocol – currently abdicated to technologists and engineers – will be developed.
Who will be the author of the autobiographies of our emerging smart machines?
3.
If Wired isn’t having fun with us, Ecobot suggests that the road to the animates will
take time. Consider:
Currently being fed a diet of dead flies and rotten apples, the robot isn't one for
speed . . .. Ecobot II can crawl along at a top speed of about 2 to 4
centimeters every 15 minutes, fueled by eight flies that are fed directly into the
microbial fuel cells (MFCs). . . .
Striking that Ecobot takes eight flies at a time, the digital octet apparently rules.
The bot has to be fed, this perceived by the design team as a disadvantage. Clearly,

36/39
far better if the Ecobot could find his (its) own meals; the developers are now
working to make the bot self-sustaining. Back to hunting and gathering:
[W]ith the development of more-powerful fuel cells, sensing mechanisms could

be set in place that allow the robots to identify their own food. Alternative
measures could involve using fly pheromones to lure flies into the system85.
Given the complex behaviors involved with luring and trapping prey, though,
the first generation of such robots is more likely to consist of natural
vegetarians, eventually developing in such a way as to eat any organic matter
A reality check, albeit whacky and not just a tad uncanny. The Holodeck, Terminator
and Teddy are far off into the future, if any future at all86. The United Nations
Economic Commission for Europe report foresees growth in robotic devices (and
therefore proto-animates) taking off exponentially especially in domestic and
personal applications, in which they are already surpassing sales of industrial
applications87. Reputable forecasters publish projections envisaging machines
smarter than people by 201588. The reality, as reported by the Menzel and Atasio 89,
still falls on its face, crashes, malfunctions, and is beset by gremlins: Fallible, funny,
furry and cute – a friendly technology? That’s a possible reality, the others implied
by the conference in Palermo on robots and ethics and very serious private and
military funding, study and applications of proto-animates should give us pause90.
Imagine living in a material and social world where everything is “smart” meaning
that it is inter-networked, designed, and enabled and probably monitored by
someone else – distant, faceless, efficient. The hard reality, & it is this in part that
causes us to conjecture the animates, is that McLuhan’s insistence that we are the
content of our media and technologies is just as true today as when its correlate --
“Know Thyself” -- was carved by the Greeks above the entrance to the prophetic
Archer god’s sanctum at Delphi. We are a self-consciously relational species:
Anything that promises to powerfully affect or perhaps transform our modes of
communication, to shape our environments of relevance and significance, and to
85
Lakshmi Sandhana, Ecobot Eats Dead Flies for Fuel: Robots Walk, Robots Talk and, Soon, Robots Will
Eat, Too. (Wried, 02:00 AM Dec. 15, 2004 PT 2004 [cited 23 December 2004]); available from
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,66036,00.html.
86
Jonathan Frakes, "Star Trek: First Contact," (USA: Paramount, 1996), Jonathan Mostow, "Terminator
3: Rise of the Machines," (USA: Warner Bros, 2003).
87
UNECE, World Robotics 2004 ([cited).
88
Ian Pearson and Ian Neild, Technology Timeline [PDF] (BT Exact Technologues, British Telecom, 2001
[cited JANUARY 16 2005]); available from http://www.btexact.com/docimages/42270/42270.pdf.
89
Menzel and D'Aluisio, Robosapiens: Evolution of a New Species.
90
Shachtman, More Robot Grunts Ready for Duty ([cited). and AUVSI Staff, Us Military Robots Employed
in Iraqi War [Website] ( 5/16/03 2005 [cited Jan 22 2005]); available from
http://www.google.com/search?q=Military+robots+to+be+used+in+Irag&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8.

37/39
condition the ways we can cultivate our relational orientations and practices,
warrants more than just our attention.
©Roman Onufrijchuk,
February 17, 2005,
Vancouver
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PUBLIC DRAFT: VERSION 2.2

On Media Conjectural and Things to Come.

On Media Conjectural and Things to Come. © Roman Onufrijchuk. February, 2005

them will be free-standing ambulatory dexterous informatic artefacts -- robots2.

On Media Conjectural and Things to Come. © Roman Onufrijchuk. February, 2005

and deeply considered interventions are a possibility, perhaps ultimately a

Negative aspects or unintended effects of many of our technological achievements,

On Media Conjectural and Things to Come. © Roman Onufrijchuk. February, 2005

beyond anything possessed by either before.

On Media Conjectural and Things to Come. © Roman Onufrijchuk. February, 2005

A rueful tone pervades Norman’s conjecturing of 1992: He noted although we

Alas technology is always a double-edged sword, always showing two faces to

On Media Conjectural and Things to Come. © Roman Onufrijchuk. February, 2005

In an interesting re-materialization, this “nebulous informatic object,” appeared as

On Media Conjectural and Things to Come. © Roman Onufrijchuk. February, 2005

On Media Conjectural and Things to Come. © Roman Onufrijchuk. February, 2005

To say that we make something animate usually means to enable something to

We can conjecture an ecology or system of technologies enabled to varying degrees

On Media Conjectural and Things to Come. © Roman Onufrijchuk. February, 2005

increasing power, sophistication and dropping costs of components and materials,

On Media Conjectural and Things to Come. © Roman Onufrijchuk. February, 2005

So what will it be, this animate? Would it be a breadbox on wheels, a manikin, a

We could conjecture a typology of the animates: A controlling core, something like a

On Media Conjectural and Things to Come. © Roman Onufrijchuk. February, 2005

today. Additionally, if we extrapolate on the indicators, we may imagine such a core

A personal animate communication ecology could be very much enabling and

On Media Conjectural and Things to Come. © Roman Onufrijchuk. February, 2005

unnoticed, unintended, and unforeseen.

Could we understand them by analogy drawn from historical experiences – an

On Media Conjectural and Things to Come. © Roman Onufrijchuk. February, 2005

On Media Conjectural and Things to Come. © Roman Onufrijchuk. February, 2005

Perhaps, plagued by many suppliers and poor quality control, noninteroperabilities,

On Media Conjectural and Things to Come. © Roman Onufrijchuk. February, 2005

We might think of these five provisional categories as settings, or borrowing from

On Media Conjectural and Things to Come. © Roman Onufrijchuk. February, 2005

If our conjectural systematic inquiry is to get at the substance of Norman’s

Relational orientations – part conscious, part unconscious; in parts biological, social,

On Media Conjectural and Things to Come. © Roman Onufrijchuk. February, 2005

and personal; diversely inflected combinations of nature and nurture; shaped by

On Media Conjectural and Things to Come. © Roman Onufrijchuk. February, 2005

On Media Conjectural and Things to Come. © Roman Onufrijchuk. February, 2005

Kinship is a primary social environment in which we accede to a name and a face.

The neighbour and we have something in common, always. Be it a fence, a border,

On Media Conjectural and Things to Come. © Roman Onufrijchuk. February, 2005

themselves or as proxies? Might they be given power of attorney by or for their

On Media Conjectural and Things to Come. © Roman Onufrijchuk. February, 2005

Individually vulnerable creatures at best, we cleave to others and simultaneously

On Media Conjectural and Things to Come. © Roman Onufrijchuk. February, 2005

On Media Conjectural and Things to Come. © Roman Onufrijchuk. February, 2005

Needful things, or material culture, is large category and encompasses everything

On Media Conjectural and Things to Come. © Roman Onufrijchuk. February, 2005

On Media Conjectural and Things to Come. © Roman Onufrijchuk. February, 2005

On Media Conjectural and Things to Come. © Roman Onufrijchuk. February, 2005

As with all the orientations and imperatives or constants of diaposon of human

On Media Conjectural and Things to Come. © Roman Onufrijchuk. February, 2005

enables living with others62?

On Media Conjectural and Things to Come. © Roman Onufrijchuk. February, 2005

On Media Conjectural and Things to Come. © Roman Onufrijchuk. February, 2005

A speculative species, we are given over to curiosity, conjecture, learning and

On Media Conjectural and Things to Come. © Roman Onufrijchuk. February, 2005

On Media Conjectural and Things to Come. © Roman Onufrijchuk. February, 2005