Exploring Human-Tech Hybridity at the Intersection of Extended Cognition and Distributed Agency: A Focus on Self-Tracking Devices

In an increasingly technology-textured environment, smart, intelligent and responsive technology has moved onto the body of many individuals. Mobile phones, smart watches, and wearable activity trackers (WATs) are just some of the technologies that are guiding, nudging, monitoring, and reminding individuals in their day-to-day lives. These devices are designed to enhance and support their human users, however, there is a lack of attention to the unintended consequences, the technology non-neutrality and the darker sides of becoming human-tech hybrids. Using the extended mind theory (EMT) and agential intra-action, we aimed at exploring how human-tech hybrids gain collective skills and how these are put to use; how agency is expressed and how this affects the interactions; and what the darker sides are of being a human-tech hybrid. Using a qualitative method, we analyzed the experiences of using a WAT, with a specific focus on how the tracker and the individual solve tasks, share competences, develop new skills, and negotiate for agency and autonomy. We contributed with new insight on human-tech hybridity and presented a concept referred to as the agency pendulum, reflecting the dynamism of agency. Finally, we demonstrated how the EMT and agential intra-action as a combined theoretical lens can be used to explore human-tech hybridity

Exploring Human-Tech Hybridity at the Intersection of Extended Cognition and Distributed Agency: A Focus on Self-Tracking Devices

In an increasingly technology-textured environment, smart, intelligent and responsive technology has moved onto the body of many individuals. Mobile phones, smart watches, and wearable activity trackers (WATs) are just some of the technologies that are guiding, nudging, monitoring, and reminding individuals in their day-to-day lives. These devices are designed to enhance and support their human users, however, there is a lack of attention to the unintended consequences, the technology non-neutrality and the darker sides of becoming human-tech hybrids. Using the extended mind theory (EMT) and agential intra-action, we aimed at exploring how human-tech hybrids gain collective skills and how these are put to use; how agency is expressed and how this affects the interactions; and what the darker sides are of being a human-tech hybrid. Using a qualitative method, we analyzed the experiences of using a WAT, with a specific focus on how the tracker and the individual solve tasks, share competences, develop new skills, and negotiate for agency and autonomy. We contributed with new insight on human-tech hybridity and presented a concept referred to as the agency pendulum, reflecting the dynamism of agency. Finally, we demonstrated how the EMT and agential intra-action as a combined theoretical lens can be used to explore human-tech hybridity

Ariadne’s Thread: A Letter to Descartes

As Galileo peered through a lens to see the twinkle of the Jovian moons, and Antonie Van Leeuwenhoek did the same to study the tremulous basis of all life, so the fabric of threads we weave across time and space – the vast net of relations that bind and separate us – is visible only through a lens. Footprints in the snow and the weathered stone steps of buildings hint at the shape of these threads, but the coming of spring and the hardness of stone limit our observations. The Global Positioning System (GPS) now provides us a lens to see the path that individuals, families, and communities take in space-time -- their worldlines. When millions of GPS signatures are collected from hundreds of individuals, heritable patterns emerge that embody particular individual’s ideas and practices, as well as those of the society and the environment in which they operate. Besides providing a tool to test assumptions about how space is used, I argue in this thesis that by allowing us to glimpse a terra incognita, mapping worldlines also provides a unique perspective on our spatial relationship to one another

Simulation and Analysis of a Shared Extended Mind

Some types of animals exploit patterns created in the environment as external mental states, thus obtaining an extension of their mind. In the case of social animals, the creation and exploitation of such patterns can be shared, which supports a form of shared extended mind or collective intelligence. This article explores this shared extended mind principle for social animals in more detail. The focus is on formal analysis and formalization of the dynamic properties of the processes involved, both at the local level (the basic mechanisms) and the global level (the emerging properties of the whole), and their relationships. A case study in social ant behavior in which the shared extended mind plays an important role is used as an illustration. For this case, simulations are described based on specifications of local properties, and global properties are specified and verified. © 2005, Sage Publications. All rights reserved