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1. Some Assumptions about Human-Computer Interaction What, if ubiquitous technologies - and within them their connotated sub-texts such as language and first and foremost every-day-practises – have shaped and will precursor not only the way we conceive and perceive the world, but also re-affect the way we interact within and with our environments, especially during face-to-face direct communicative acts, and with our tendency to develop increasingly intelligent devices? Furthermore, what if we do not merely model these technologies after us, humanize, personalize, anthropomorph them, but in return they reciprocically morph us, machinize us? What, if the history of communication – and therefore the history of Human-Computer Interaction - has always been a history of mutual, sometimes equal exchange between two or more parties - alas, not necessarily a passage of information between organic and anorganic - that is, for example, an electronic medium and an audience; but also that the inherent structure of such communicative acts have patronized the very means by which we absolve communication? The concepts of the Cyborg (and nomadic mobility concepts of ubiquity), even though close to above mentioned rhetorical question, and mass media as an McLuhanesque, embracing extension of our bodies, do lack this element of reciprocity, of symbiosis. Picture this: you are my Buddy Body now, whilst you are reading, surfing, climbing, diving and driving, dreaming these lines. We all foresee that we will also be practising these actions in a near future simultaneously, too, if not the written word itself in any case will have become obsolete. Thinking of the history of the 20th century, in advanced capitalistic, liberal-democratic societies, we stumble over one main incident configuring the trivia of our lives: media. Because cutting-edge technologies in the process of mostly media development - after a societal shift from technologies of industrialization to the microscopic smooth/smart technological agenda - have shaped older, earlier technologies, I believe that practices within these off-shelf technologies re-affect - especially if they are as powerful as computers - the spheres in which they agitate, primarily the inscriptional hide of our bodies. But not only that: Interfaces, then, are the mediators between and betwixt participating parties, whose interrogational endogene Q&A, intraaction, leads to decisive, exogene acts on either side(s) of the participants. So one could try and not only understand an interface as - à lettre - the contemporary medium between anorganic and organic, machine and flesh agents, but also, within my assumed reciprocal symbiosis, organic and organic, or anorganic and anorganic. What’s left are use, abuse and sometimes mutuality. In this context, our world in action (that cannot longer be quantitatively or qualitatively operationalized) is represented, but also lived and connotated, through Symbiotic Media. Yet, it is not only a string quartet of negotiations changing communicative constellations, but far more, it is the ubiquitous, omnipresent, visible and invisible mass network of organic and anorganic extensions that has turned interior and exterior into one, then many, then some connections we perform. But we are not only recipient, we are in this together. I am not a sender, and you are not a receiver, because you are not merely you, and I am not only me. We are many: producer, distributor, agency, the adressed, rarely one of of these at a time, mostly some simultaneously: We are Symbiotic Media when our cultural and biological bodies merge as phenomenons of the real and virtual merge, also. What matters is that neither privacy and public, real and virtual, nor subject and object exist, probably have never existed, but were initiated. We, in every distinct aspect of our lifes, mediate constantly, whereas the colonial store of signs is constantly mediated through and to us. To its extreme, in this net of relative interrelations, we are, in any imanginable synthesis (merged bodies, cyborgs and so on) always both self-referential and highly exterior-dependable, in artificial spaces of simultaneity. Together with ubiquitous technologies and their offsprings, Symbiotic Media, we form a TV show, a spectacle, an event, a product, an every-day-practise, or there are every-day-practises, products, events, spectacles, and TV shows we interact with, but we cannot exclude ourselves from them in order to, so to say, become autonomous (again). It works the other way round, too: If I try to put myself into the position of these technologies, they also would – if they could – come to understand us to be their counterpart forming above mentioned artifacts. It might sound strange to you, but according to my argument, try to think of your Internet-Car as the reciprocal element from whose perspective we are the other part lacking. You may say: but cars don’t think the way we do, they are intelligent, because we told them to be, and the Wireless-Access-System will work regardless of whether we move the vehicle or not. And that’s just the problem. Remember what I introduced earlier: Here, we deal with our buddy body car. The car and us have melted into a new, temporary limited cultural and biological body. We perform Symbotic Interaction. In a world, where mobility and ubiquitous technologies – by the way not a novel invention – find their expression though statements such as ‘Embedding the Internet’, one needs to assure himself and herself that it’s not about embedding the Internet alone, but very much also about negotiating the metaphors we apply to this issue – therefore it’s also about questions of power, and after all of empowerment, accessibility, and issues of Interface Design as the battlefield of societal acts. The Internet-Car example just proves this assumption right: There, we do encounter all kinds of communicative acts between participants, in short four to name: driver, car (including electronic devices), Wireless-Sender, Wireless-Receiver. And all of those have a substantial role to play, which they could not exceed without each other. In Figure 1, the first party, Driver and Car, become a new body, a Symbiotic Medium. Figure 2 pictures how that new entity, now accompanied by a Speech-Recognition-Wireless-Internet-Sender - Symbiotic Medium I - communicates with the second party, Wireless-Internet-Receiver. Speech’s here the Symbiotic Interface within Symbiotic Medium I. Now, the Wireless-Internet-parties perform Symbiotic Interaction and establish Symbiotic Medium II, whilst the titles of Sender and Receiver become interexchangeable. The whole picture allows for Symbiotic Medium III, a next-level entity consisting of Car plus Driver plus Wireless-Internet-Sender/Receiver, and the corresponding Wireless-Internet-Sender/Receiver on the outside.
2. Where I come from: Insights into Thought Experiment Processing Now, the merger of what’s real, and/or virtual, becomes even more evident with the increasing development of ubiquitous technologies and smart, self-referential entities - or let me state: Ubiquitous Symbiotic Media as a state of Symbiotic Interaction. I’m aware this hypothesis will need to be explained in more detail, and lacks a more concise examination of e.g. information flow (for example the Information Architecture of the Car-Server etc.), but let’s consider this still a thought experiment. You may ask how I came to think of symbiosis as a neat methodological model: The other day, I did some research on individuation processes between mother and child, and I stumbled over Mahler/Pine/Bergman’s "The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant", where the authors consider phases of growing-up through case studies and theoretical hyothesises. Mahler/Pine/Bergman (1975) structure the process of individuation into four, biologically underlined phases: differentiation; trial; rapproachment (sic!); consolidation of individuality and beginning of constant emotional objectification. I found it thrilling to think of these schemes in terms of Human-Computer-Interaction, with us being parents, and Technology being our children, also with regards to the unfolding discourse of manhood becoming God because we are controlling technology. Secondly, the entertaining read of "Furtive Fauna. A Field Guide to the Creatures Who Live on You" by Knutson (1996) reminded me instantly of McLuhan/Fiore’s (1967) "The Medium is the Massage. An Inventory of Effects", and made me think of reciprocity and the re-affecting role of technology. Symbiosis, it seemed, was worth to be looked at more insightfully. In addition, I recommend an earlier writing of mine dealing with the problem of identity in Virtual Enviroments, and therefore with the problem of symbiosis. Since I’ve been asking for new metaphors capable of informing us about the interrelationship between human beings and technology, and adequate incapsulated interfaces, in the following, I will apply my vision to this often misused, misunderstood concept of evolution, namely symbiosis, to propose a brief methodological analysis framework of Ubiquitous Human-Computer-Interaction. My focus here is that of describing and examining the nature of societal, interdependent ecto-relationships. I also see chances of applying this metaphor to the way Humans and Technology interact in terms of information flow and exchange. We should re-iterate biological endo-symbiosis research then, too. The fields of AI, Information Systems Design, Human Factors might profit sufficiently, since there’s a lot to learn from "evolution by association".
3. A Symbiotic Interaction Analysis-Model These are the presuppositions of a Symbiotic Interaction Analysis: There are several sub-classifications of symbiosis; I do understand these classes vertically when it comes down to power-structures manifested through postive or negative, or non-existent benefit (Table 2), whereas there’s a horizontal scaling possible, too, in correlation with the purpose of Symbiotic Interaction (Table 3). By way of these brief definitions, I’m considering two parties literally incorporated, and for reasons of transparency, I will be using Human (H) and Computer (C) to exemplify the definition, and the relative interrelationship of former and latter.
4. Why Symbiotic Interaction matters As we saw: classic biological (or psychological) symbiosis can be classified into sub-categories - Mutualism, Parasitism, Commensalism, Competition, and Neutralism. Although there’s been a long-lasting debate on the exact definition of symbiosis, for this treatise I have been operating with the proposed terminology, and the findings suggest further, lengthier examination. Future research in HCI, then, cannot merely aim at just joining the circle of researchers forecasting the upcoming age of Interface where "future networked computing systems will achieve a degree of sophistication and functionality that will make today’s Internet appear primitive in comparison". At the dawn of an ubiquitous, mythological age, Symbiotic Interfaces and therefore Symbiotic Interaction will be the battlefield of use, abuse and sometimes mutuality. Its languages will be trade markets of codifications and the result of intraactions, and its currency accessibility. When Japanese architect Kisho Kurokawa (1997) praised the 21st century to be the Age of Symbiosis, he also alarmed us to be aware of the massive paradigm shift of power-structures within advanced capitalistic societies, which are, after all, still not communities. The rapidly growing field of HCI should therefore start to think about new metaphors of how to make our lives with each other (including ubiquitous technologies) more liveable, and graspable.
Acknowledgements This paper was supported by Prof. Allucquère Rosanne Stone of the ACTlab, and Prof. Horace Newcomb, Department of Radio-Television-Film, both from the University of Texas at Austin, USA. Thanks to Tim Danckwardt and Monique Scheer for substantial critique, and Nicole Labry for editing. My work is partially funded by the State of Baden-Wuerttemberg, Germany, and the Universitaetsbund at the University of Tuebingen.
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