george furnace - bitpick
Digital Embodiment
Much of modern cogition exists in digital environments, and both human beings and digital agents have affordances in those environments which consititue a "digital body". I am interested in exploring the relationship between the structure of these bodies and the kinds of cognitive tasks which can include them.
Digital environments are many and varied: the two dimensional desktop, the world wide web, VISA's telephone based credit card authorization network, the security system in this building. Each environment-human pair has a different set of affordances. For me, the desktop affords pointing, activating, and streaming of text into certain kinds of boxes. Thus on the desktop, my body is a cursor, a character stream, and a frame buffer. These are the digital limbs of our cyborg body.
Additionally, there are many digital agents participating in many cognitive tasks through bodies of their own. Most of the digital agents in the world are functions. The affordances they have are defined by the data available in their particular scope: function parameters, global variables, and whatever libraries are loaded./weise
If we look at one cognitive task: the spell checking of a document, it is obvious how different these bodies are. The human perceives affordances for clicking, one of which is the button for spell checking. Thanks to the pointer, the clicking and activating behavior is easy. More information appears on the screen, indicating a misspelled word in context, and several additional activities which can be done: change the spelling, ignore it, etc. Using the pointing and activating behaviors, the human continues choosing answers to these digital questions.
The digital spell checker's experience is very different. It sits dormant most of its life, waiting for the bit (literally) of information that periodically enters its mind: the "GO!" signal. Immediately, the spell checker emerges from its haze of nothingness into a rich digital representation of a document: a tree of nodes representing characters and words and tables and images, functions are available to it which control text kerning and extract streams of bits representing clipart and equations and dozens of other digital goodies.
Most of this world is invisible to the spell checker, however. It doesn't really perceive anything other than its dictionary and the text of the document, which it sees not as a rich multimedia tree, but as a plain list of words. However, it has another digital limb: it controls a