Ontology, what ontology?:

[1]

The question of being thus aims at an a priori condition of the possibility not only of the sciences which investigate beings of such and such a type – and are thereby already involved in an understanding of being; but it aims also at the condition of the possibility of the ontologies which precede the ontic sciences and found them. All ontology, no matter how rich and tightly knit a system of categories it has at its disposal, remains fundamentally blind and perverts its innermost intent if it has not previously clarified the meaning of being sufficiently and grasped this clarification as its fundamental task.

- Heidegger, Being and Time

[2]

We commit ourselves to an ontology containing number when we say there are prime numbers larger than a million; we commit ourselves to an ontology containing centaurs when we say there are centaurs; and we commit ourselves to an ontology containing Pegasus when we say Pegasus is. But we do not commit ourselves to an ontology containing Pegasus or the author of ‘Waverly’ or the round square cupola on Berkeley College when we say that Pegasus or the author of ‘Waverly’ or the cupola in question is *not*. We need no longer labor under the delusion that the meaningfulness of a statement containing a singular term presupposes an entity named by the term. A singular term need not name to be significant…To be assumed as an entity is, purely and simply, to be reckoned as the value of a variable.

- Quine, On What There Is

[3]

It is absolutely necessary, for the peace and safety of mankind, that some of earth’s dark, dead corners and unplumbed depths be let alone; lest sleeping abnormalities wake to resurgent life, and blasphemously surviving nightmares squirm and splash out of their black lairs to newer and wider conquests.

- Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness

The paleolithic cave painters, on their backs in the long dark, representing.

But there’s a moment with all of these tools when you first pick the thing up — before it melds itself into your extended being, before it disappears into the task of being-in-the-world once and forever, there must be a first time, when you test the heft of the thing as a thing with capabilities, when it is briefly possible to feel the interface betwen self and thing (I remember the first whole texts I read as a child, and that could feel the world through the words. But soon there was only the world — language since then has become such a part of me, it is no longer a tool I feel the use of).

We don’t seem to have words for that moment — feeling the new newness of something becoming part of us (we don’t really have a word for that incorporation itself, either, other than love, and this is not love) — when we are, briefly and uniquely, aware of the particular interface it effects between us and our task, surely a moment when we can learn something, when we last see clearly our chosen tool and feel its heft, become aware of how it rubs against our hand in a particular way, has a certain weight, and more importantly, how it could be different — that there might have been other choices, other ways to light our way through the forest, other ways to scar the world with our memories and desires that the future might know us… when we heft the tool-as-a-thing for the first (and last) time (think ‘early man’ lifting the thighbone in the prelude to 2001) and it becomes part of us, and reshapes us and our (the only) world forever.

The ready-to-hand is not grasped theoretically at all… The peculiarity of what is proximally ready-to-hand is that, in its readiness-to-hand, it must, as it were, withdraw in order to be ready-to-hand quite authentically. That with which our everyday dealings proximally dwell is not the tools themselves. On the contrary, that with which we concern ourselves is primarily the work.

Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, quoted in Paul Dourish, Where The Action Is

But this assumes exclusive modalities: we are either performing a task or not. It seems to say little about a world in which we seek constant ambient awareness. We want the tool to withdraw into the task, certainly, but what is the task? The easy answer is that it is being-in-a-context: being-at-work, relaxing-at-home, escaping-on-holiday. Each of those roles would call for activation of a different set of tools, which then withdraw themselves into the actions appropriate to that role. But I don’t think thats how it is. Extended awareness is analagous to metatools such as language; the task is that of being-in-the-world. There isn’t an off button.

As Ben points out, it is strange that ubiquitous computing is mostly treated as an engineering problem. It is not impossible that, 8000 years ago, writing was conceived as the mostly technological issue of flint-sharpening.

[More on this later]