Culture tells us what it is okay to like, and new culture is often shown to us through movies. We now feel it okay to use a computer interface with gesture recognition, because we’ve seen it in Minority Report. Here, Minority Report has given us the narrative that allows us to collectively imagine a future.

The analog world is full of friction. It takes a tremendous amount of time and space to get from a place to a goal, or to begin an action or to initialize interactions or collection action. The digital space brings the far nearer, and reduces the amount of analog interface changes required to accomplish something.

Millions of vehicles travel down highways every day. But when a highway needs to be repaired, detours must installed.. In these situations, traffic slows down, and people get angry. The entire process of redirecting traffic, whether permanent or temporary, ranges in length from days to years.

Online, redirecting traffic is a far simpler process. A 301 redirect a stream of traffic to be directed to another website, and this usually can be accomplished in 20 minutes by a site administrator. The detour is compressed and hidden, and in some cases, site visitors don’t even have to know that a site has been redirected.

The difference between redirecting traffic in the digital world versus the physical world is enormous. 1.5 million dollar redirects vs. 20 minutes of computer time. Even though highways compress the space and time it takes to get from one place to another, they are still slow compared to what can be accomplished on the Internet.

In the same way, innovation in a frictionless atmosphere is faster. Words are not tied to the page like in a book. In the analog world, changing text in a book means releasing a new, updated edition. Not so in the digital world! A simple click and the HTML can be altered, allowing updates without a re-instatement of distribution lines and manufacturing processes.

Reproducing technologies online allows others to improve them with us, and this allows producers to improve them faster than objects/organic objects take to improve in real life.

Good design reduces friction.

To survive, interfaces must quickly flow from spaces of high-resistance and poor usability to spaces that reduce the number of interface changes needed to get to relevant data. Environments are becoming aware of relevant information, and are able to pull context-aware data into play when necessary. In All That is Solid Melts Into Air, Marshall Berman discusses the transition from heavy modernity to light modernity, and the machine revolution that occurred when more power was concentrated into increasingly smaller spaces. As Sheldon Renan says, “devices can be small on the outside, but huge on the inside”.

This is a reversal of the devices of early industry, which has much on the outside, but nothing on the inside. The flat liquid crystal display of the iPhone is a wormhole, black hole and galaxy all at once.

What happens when information access permeates increasing layers of our everyday lives? What effect does omnipresent connectivity have on our mental state? 

"Ours is ʻa new form of schizophreniaʼ, Baudrilliard said of the current era, “the emergence of ʻan immanent promiscuity and the perpetual interconnection of all information and communication networksʼ leads to ʻa state of terror which is characteristic of the schizophrenicʼ, that of ʻan over-proximity of all thingsʼ (Baudrillard, 1988c:27) (Baudrillard, J., & Lotringer, S. (1988). The ecstasy of communication. Foreign agents series. Brooklyn, N.Y.: Autonomedia). 

"…The schizophrenic is not,” he continues, “as generally claimed, characterized by his loss of touch with reality, but by the absolute proximity to and total instantaneousness with things, this overexposure to the transparency of the world'," 

“The surplus of information has a powerful democratizing effect", says Thomas Eriksen of the University of Oslo, "since it makes it impossible for the State or self-appointed elites to dictate which knowledge each of us should appropriate; at the same time, it has – for the exact same reason – fragmenting effects. A new scarce resource is coherence.”

“Whoever is able to filter and sort the information at his or her disposal, and is thereby able to discard ninety-nine per cent as irrelevant, wins this game – not whoever is able to remember the names of Russian rivers or African heads of state”

(Obsessive egalitarianism to pluralist universalism?
Options for twenty-first century education.
Keynote speech, NERA conference, Oslo 10 March 2005. Thomas Hylland Eriksen
University of Oslo and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
t.h.eriksen@culcom.uio.no).

In Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents, his words suggest "a possible future in which the magnificence of humans as prosthetic gods is tempered by the ill-fitting and troublesome nature of their auxiliary organs” (11).
 
We are Gods, until we forget to plug in our devices. When our phones break, suddenly our ears cannot hear all the way to Japan at the mere touch of a button. When we spill water on our computers, we no longer can access files that we’ve saved to the externalized prosthetic for our cranium. The information that serves as social and work currency gets stuck, lost, and forever cut off from our ability to access it.
 
In the same way, our external organs sit angrily attacked in office cubicles, in airports -- in all of the interface exchanges we encounter during our daily lives -- such as the ATM machine, the coin dispenser, ect. The copiers, printers, scanners, and fixers; the software inside our computers, and the computer itself.
 
We're beginning to have prostheses inside of prostheses. Interface inside of interface, malfunction compounded by poor design and the decay of time.
 
Planned obsolescence has given us machines that must be constantly updated and refreshed Good experiences are guaranteed as long as one stays on top of the purchasing wave.
 
Once one falls behind, the prostheses become worrisome --gives us more and more friction when dealing with reality. To upgrade generally decreases this friction -- lubricates us to glide more freely through the rigors of society.

The Tamagotchi became a household name shortly after Japanese toy producer Bandai released the small egg-shaped computer into the hands of millions of adoring youth.

The idea of instantaneity has driven much of the development of the middle class consumer society. The idea of compressing the power of number of living things into a single device, tamed and always-ready leads us to use descriptors such as horse-power. 

A computer monitor connected to a network becomes a window through which we can be present in a place thousands of miles away” (Manovich, 1, 1995). (Source: Kunstforum International. Germany,1995;  NewMediaTopia. Moscow, Soros Center for the Contemporary Art, 1995).  

“Remote surgery (also known as telesurgery) is the ability for a doctor to perform surgery on a patient even though they are not physically in the same location. It is a form of telepresence…It promises to allow the expertise of specialized surgeons to be available to patients worldwide, without the need for patients to travel beyond their local hospital” (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_surgery).   

In the same way, users teleoperate each other’s Facebook walls. They use technological tools to remotely augment each other’s social identities. The personalities of Facebook users are available to friends worldwide, without the need for friends to travel beyond their local neighborhood, household, or college. 

Facebook is a form of virtual telepresence. Each friend teleoperates each other’s walls through text and the addition of images and social tagging. These technosocial operations cocreate digital identities and the presentation of self in digital life.  

Actors in the network can interaction with representations of others in real time through the use of cell phones and chat, and in delayed time by Twitter replies, E-mail and profiles.  

The personal boundary extends into the public. It is not completely translucent, as one chooses how to represent the self online. Avatar, text, link-sharing, ‘following’.  

The more signals we pass through our computers, the more integrated we become. But the more signals we pass through, the more teleoperated our friends become. The further away and far-spread our communities can actually be. We can have them in the palm of our hand, whether in Germany, Japan or Russia.  

There's a term for what we're experiencing -- technonomadicity -- no matter where we are, we can be somewhere else.