Tools sink into extended being: it takes craft and intent to keep them visible. I’m wondering if there’s some connection with Shklovsky’s thoughts on art: that art exists to make perception difficult. Is art, amongst the other things it is, what makes us aware of what is the kernel of us, minus our embedded tools, yet through their use in its creation? Is that some of what art does, and how?

Ink that in five lines
becomes a bunch of nettles,
in the night points one step north; where the colour of water
gets over the road,
over the pearl of the three-quarter moon, gets in
after, before
the first thought

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

Back to Heidegger: that tools which are ‘ready to hand’ (zuhanden) disappear into the task, and only become again ‘tools’ to us (as being, in themselves, things) when we put them down. I’ve written before, wondering about tools which we never put down — the tools which once we start using them, are internalised into our augmented experience — tools which become so much a part of our embodied being that we can never see them again in their own thingness. The word, not the axe. Also, possibly, pervasive tools like the mobile phone, certainly the internet, for some of us.

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.

Heidegger makes the distinction between tools with are ‘ready-to-hand’ (zuhanden) and those which are ‘present-at-hand’ (vorhanden). We are, he says, only conscious of tools as tools when they are present-at-hand. When we are actively engaged in performing a task through use of the tool, we lose consciouness of the tool itself, which ‘withdraws’ into the task.

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]