Humans vs Machines
Traditionally, technology and people are considered separate entities. The people operate, the technology is the tool. Increasingly, however, technology and people have become merged in the sense that technology operates people as well as the other way around.
Thompson’s discussion of video games separates interactions between human and machine into two categories. Actions taken are either diegetic, in game, or non-diegetic, out of the game. Thus there are four types of interactions.
1. The diegetic human act, or a typical user interaction: move forward, hit the bad guys.
2. The diegetic machine act, or how the machine responds to user interactions: the enemies fall over and die.
3. The non-diegetic human act, or an action the user takes out of the game world, for example hitting the pause button.
4. The non-diegetic machine act, or when the machine behaves out of context of the game, for example, showing a “game over” dialogue.
The non-diegetic machine act allows the machine to elicit powerful emotions from the user by using disabling and enabling acts and directly influence the user’s response. Thus traditional theories of a clear divide between human and machine must be discarded.
Take for example a laptop. It is a tool, something used to organize life and connect to the world. Alone, it is just a machine, which cannot do anything. When a human operator is added, he can use the laptop to work on his humanities assignments and submit them to Medium. From the machine, he may receive a positive response (Your story has successfully been posted) or a negative response (Oops! Please try again). When the first is seen, the user knows he has finished and can go off to watch videos of cats and laughing babies for his next assignment. When the second is seen, the user should check his internet connection, hit submit a couple more times, and cry.
Users understand that they are capable of using a laptop to access resources. When machines are embraced as part of the self and all the benefits provided by the machines are taken as granted, digital culture can once again be simplified to interactions between humans, or rather, super humans who can spread information much faster.
In a sense, the laptop is a part of the user. Without either, homework would not get finished. There would be no interactions and no point of studying digital culture. Taken together, there is no place where the human ends or the machine starts. The machine is part of the human. We are all cyborgs, after all.
References
Thompson, J. (2012). Games, Glitches, Ghosts: Giving Voice to Enchantment in the Gamic Assemblage. The International Journal of Technology, Knowledge, and Society (8), 85–93.
