8.9 Media as Arenas for Unified Perception and Action

The trend towards evermore rapid and extensive externalization of cognitive functions in nonbiological media leaves us paradoxically as creatures with an ancient and largely fixed core of perception-action modalities surrounded by rapidly fluctuating and increasingly powerful technological augmentation frameworks. Thus, whether emergent media technologies serve human beings well depends on the extent to which they honor ancient human capabilities for perceiving and acting, capabilities that are grounded in the fundamental ecological necessities of long ago.

8.9.1 Transformation and Alienation

While glib marketers of computer-based media tantalize us with vast fields of electronic action and apparently unlimited degrees of freedom, skeptics (W. Gibson, 1984; Mander, 1978; McKibbin, 1989) have served up warnings of isolation, manipulation, and diminished authenticity that can be traced back through McLuhan (1965) to Rousseau's (1764/1911) classic treatise on alienation from nature.

Much public discussion of the limitations and negative effects of so-called passive media such as television implicitly acknowledges both the epistemological and moral dimensions of mediated experience. For example, the hope that multimedia technology will redress the problems of an obese couch-potato nation that mindlessly surfs television channels in search of sex and violence is partly based on the assumption that somehow interactivity will empower viewers with more choices and promote a greater awareness and understanding of nature and culture. Yet what is interactivity and how do the ways we interact with media model the ways we interact with nature or culture? To begin to answer such questions we need to examine the relationship between perception and action--both in real worlds and in the artificial worlds represented by media systems and products.

The hope of human history has often been that technological augmentation would make us into gods or angels, or at least make us superior to enemies and aliens. Media technologies and the cognitive artifacts associated with them have played a special role in this regard by offering the seductive possibility of transformation: more than mere augmentation, a permanent acquisition of special knowledge and experience through recorded sounds and images. Yet receiving the word or beholding a revelation, whether real or artifactual, without active and appropriate participation risks distorted understanding and resultant alienation. Recognition of such risks underlay the prohibition of graven images that has figured strongly in Judaic, Islamic, and Bhuddist religious traditions.

In Christianity, doubts about religious imagery peaked in the eighth century with the radical proscriptions of the iconoclasts, who wanted to eliminate all religious depictions as demonic; such doubts helped to dampen Western artistic exploration until the Renaissance.

For human beings and all organisms, integration of action with perception is a necessary but not sufficient condition for living well. "Perception is the mechanism that functions to inform the actor of the means the environment affords for realizing the actor's goals" (Turvey, Shaw, Reed & Mace, 1982, p. 378). Perceptual faculties languish and degrade when they are decoupled from opportunities for action. Separated from action, perception cannot serve as a basis for formulating hypotheses and principles, for testing models and theories~ for choosing alternatives, or for exploring consequences.

Indeed, Eleanor Gibson (1994) has reviewed a growing body of evidence that strongly suggests that without opportunities for action, or appropriate substitutes for action, perception does not develop at all or takes on wildly distorted forms. Behavioral capabilities likewise languish and degrade when they are decoupled from perception. "Action is the mechanism that functions to select the means by which goals of the actor may be effected" (Turvey, Shaw, Reed & Mace, 1982, p. 378). Deprived of information concerning opportunities for action, perception alone results in ritualistic performance unrelated to any real task and hence any realizable goal.

It is worth noting in this context that sin in the original Christian sense of the word meant to miss the mark, implying a failure that cannot be assigned to either action or perception alone. A similar understanding of the incompleteness of perception isolated from action can be found in other traditions, notably Zen (see, for example, Herrigel's 1953 classic Zen and the Art ofArchery). Many meditative disciplines teach integration of perception and action by training students to unify attention (perception) and intention (action), using exercises such as "following one's breathing."

8.9.2 Caves and Consciousness

We need to move from our exclusive concern with the logic of processing, or reason, to the logic of perception. Perception is the basis of wisdom. For 24 centuries we have put all our intellectual effort into the logic of reason rather than the logic of perception. Yet in the conduct of human affairs perception is far more important. Why have we made this mistake? We might have believed that perception did not really matter and could in the end be controlled by logic and reason. We did not like the vagueness, subjectivity, and variability of perception and sought refuge in the solid absolutes of truth and logic. To some extent the Greeks created logic to make sense of perception. We were content to leave perception to the world of art (drama, poetry, painting, music, dance) while reason got on with its own business in science, mathematics, economics, and government. We have never understood perception. Perceptual truth is different from constructed truth. --Edward de Bono, I am right--You are wrong: From rock logic to water logic (199 1, p. 42).

Among the ancient perplexities associated with the human condition, the relationship between perception, action, and environment has endured even as technical context and consciousness have continued to evolve. In the annals of Western civilization, Plato's Allegory of the Cave (Plato, The Republic) remains one of the most elegant and compelling treatments of the central issues. Chained and therefore unable to move, his cave-dwelling prisoners came to perceive shadows cast on the walls by firelight as real beings rather than phantasms. Why? Plato argues that this profound misperception resulted from external as well as internal conditions. First, consider the external conditions: If we take the liberty of imagining that the prisoners were rigidly bound and deprived of ambulatory vision, then they were probably (a) denied the cues of motion parallax that might have indicated the two-dimensionality of the shadows; (b) suffering from degraded stereopsis and texture recognition due to lighting conditions; and (c) incapacitated in their ability to investigate the source of illumination or its relationship to the props that were casting the shadows that captured their imagination.

Many readers of Plato's allegory have been tempted to assume that they would not personally be fooled in such a situation, leading us to consider the internal conditions: With a rudimentary knowledge of optics and commonsense understanding of caves, it might have been possible for the prisoners to entertain plausible alternatives to their belief that the shadows were real beings. For the prisoners to entertain such an alternative, however, would have required that they be able to construct a model of the situation that would be "runnable," that is, serve as an internal analog for the physical actions of inspecting the layout of the cave, the pathways of light, and so on. In our interpretation, what doomed the prisoners to misperception was not only that they were constrained from exploratory action but also that they were unable to integrate working mental models with what they saw.

Plato's allegory involves both epistemological and moral dimensions. Epistemology considers problems involved in representing knowledge and reality (knowing-perceiving), whereas moral philosophy considers problems involved in determining possible and appropriate action (knowing-acting). Plato reminds us that perceiving and acting are complementary and inseparable: The prisoners cannot perceive appropriately without acting appropriately, and they cannot act appropriately without perceiving appropriately.

Alan Kay (1991) summarizes our thoughts about this dilemma as it applies to contemporary education:

Up to now, the contexts that give meaning and limitation to our various knowledge have been all but invisible. To make contexts visible, make them objects of discourse, and make them explicitly reshapable and inventable. These are strong aspirations very much in harmony with the pressing needs and on-rushing changes of our own time. It is therefore the duty of a well-conceived environment for learning to be contentious and even disturbing, seek contrasts rather than absolutes, aim for quality over quantity, and acknowledge the need for will and effort (p. 140).

Who knows what Plato would say about the darkened cavelike structures we call movie theaters and home entertainment centers, where patrons watch projections cast upon a wall or screen, only dimly aware of the original or true mechanics of the events they perceive? Our ability to interpret the shadowy phantasms of modem cinema and television is constrained not only by collapsed affordances of cinematography--two-dimensional, fixed-pace sequencing of images--but also by the lack of affordances for exercising action and observing consequences. We also often lack the mental models that might allow us to work through in our minds alternatives that are not explored on the screen. Even when we possess such models, it is often impossible to "run" them, due to interference from the relentless parade of new stimuli and the unconscious inhibition that attends most movie watching: Reflect too much on what you observe and you will be left behind as the medium unfolds its representations at a predetermined pace.