Mutsugoto

Reflections on article at: http://www.distancelab.org/projects/mutsugoto/

What a sweet idea! - "Instead of exchanging e-mail or SMS messages using generic interfaces in business-like venues, Mutsugoto allows distant partners to communicate through the language of touch as expressed on the canvas of the human body. A custom computer vision and projection system allows users to draw on each other's bodies while lying in bed. Drawings are transmitted 'live' between the two beds, enabling a different kind of synchronous communication that leverages the emotional quality of physical gesture."

This is an interesting example to discuss in regards to my personal definition of spiritual technology (admittedly still taking shape). At first this seems to be an attempt to design for human values, namely intimacy. As the article says, "Human intimacy is a significant but often neglected part of modern life. More people now than ever carry on long distance relationships with romantic partners, sometimes for extended periods of time. However today's communication systems are impersonal and generic. E-mail, for example, is often read and written on the same computer and at the same desk that one uses for any other kind of communication. Phone calls and SMS messages are sent and received between partners on the same devices used for work and business." But where this goes wrong, I suppose, is that takes this characteristic of modern society as given, unquestionable, or at least unchangeable... and in fact, if it took off, would reinforce the structures that make this lack of intimacy possible. To say this more clearly, it is like applying a tourniquet to hemorrhaging society (Senge et al., 2004, would call this "shifting the burden" (204)), in short, propping up the structures that in turn enable decreased intimacy by preventing us from reaching what I would call a Turning Point, or Breaking Point. If we were, instead, to reach a point where we could finally say, "I hate this lifestyle that means I can't be with the people I love!" we might actually change as a society. But if we create technologies that make these "realities" of modern life palatable, we calcify them in practice and in our mindsets.

I sometimes think we're asking the wrong questions. The question perhaps should not be, "How do we create technology that offsets the side-effects of a technologized society?" (think of taking pills to counteract negative side-effects of other pills, and on and on). Should we not be asking, "Where did we go wrong?" I think this is why it's important to me to approach technological innovation from a spiritual perspective, i.e., to not avoid the deeper questions.