Roger Clarke is the lead-off speaker. He’s an Australian IT guy who’s been thinking about digital personas for a long time. (From his home page: “I’m a consultant specialising in eBusiness, information infrastructure, and data surveillance and information privacy.”)

His theme is that “artefacts are already infilitrating the human. E.g., prostheses (external, exo-, endo-). He presents a survey of the field. e.g., there’s Oscar Pistorius, a double amputee who runs the 200m in 22 seconds using two prostheses and spring-steel feet. And the “three-armed” artist Stelarc. And cochlear implants. And perhaps we should count agents and avatars.

Roger started talking about digital persona in 1994. “Avatars and agents create opportunities for exploitation by organizations,” he says. (Well, that’s what his PowerPoints say.) Your Google persona (what people lean of you through Google) can also be manipulated.

More hybridisation is on the way, he says, in sports, “the aging rich,” “the Homeland Security gravy train,” etc. This will lead to political implications: Social control, power-blanace between humans and “near-human entities.” He says to look for an “extended ability” olympics around 2016.

[Isn’t human existence always hybrid in Roger’s sense? Andy Clark in Being There points out that we’ve always manipulated our environment to help our thinking — from using stones to count sheep to blackboards to work through math problems to computers for advanced computations. Doesn’t that mean that human thought has been hybrid from its beginning?] [Technorati tags: ArsElectronica2005 RogerClarke]

Categories: Uncategorized dw