Bodies in Technology (review)

Bodies in Technology addresses the concern that Virtual Reality will "replace" Real Life, or that it will otherwise affect Real Life in a particular way. Don Ihde proposes to alleviate this concern. In order to set up his argument, he maintains that there are two inadequate ways of understanding embodiment. The first is the phenomenological one, described by Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, represented here in Ihde's terms as "body one." Body one has general characteristic abilities such as spatial orientation and motility, perceptual abilities, and emotions. "Body two" is Ihde's designation for the postmodern view of embodiment, such as that held by Foucault. Adherents to body two depictions focus on embodied experiences that are culturally constructed, relying on evidence such as the fact that erogenous zones differ from culture to culture.

According to Idhe, body one is inadequate because it fails to account for the productive effects of the social or cultural system, and body two is inadequate because it fails to account for any general constancy or agency. When placed in the context of technology, descriptions of body one tend to suggest that the body at its core will remain distinct and be unaffected by technology, whereas body two tends to conclude that technology will affect Real Life too much.

Throughout the book, Ihde wants to maintain that there is rather a "body three," which cuts across and is an improvement on both these views. He further maintains that body three is exemplified in the relation of the technological body, or, more precisely, embodied experiences of (in and with) technology. Body three is interactive with technology, and thereby both constitutes and is constituted by it. In the end, this view will show that experiences with technology or Virtual Reality will neither eclipse nor definitively affect Real Life embodiment.

The project is organized into four parts of two chapters each. In the first part Ihde gives a brief phenomenology of both embodiment in virtual experiences and embodiment in general. He makes the preliminary argument that, from military simulators to examples from the movie The Lawnmower Man to medical prostheses, the experience of Virtual Reality is qualitatively distinct from Real Life. Those who experience Virtual Reality know full well that they are not experiencing Real Life. Their experiences of interaction with technology are not the same as experiences apart from such interactions. Idhe moves from this point to an example of the way that male sports bodies (particularly during the adolescent period of identity formation) illustrate the problems with phenomenology and postmodernism. At one extreme he proffers Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological body as an anonymous active one and at the other he places Foucault as maintaining that all meanings are produced, down to the level of embodiment. Neither, he claims, is a satisfactory explanation. He illustrates this by detailing the way that adolescent males both constitute and are constituted in their social milieu with and by their bodies. For example, particular size either prohibits or allows entrance into certain sports, and the subsequent experience and valuation of that experience is interactive with the individual.

Part Two considers the ways in which scientific research is, in effect, a form of virtual reality and, moreover, that science and virtual reality exhibit similar features. Idhe considers that the dominance of the visual in science has a specific history and that it was one choice among other possibilities, and that consequently it is not the sufficient or singularly necessary method of relaying and perceiving information. Here Ihde gives interesting examples of how the possible alternative of auditory methods of research gave way to visual. He notes that "while early sonar was both conducted and interpreted auditorily (the observer ... trained to detect location and direction by the ping sound and time spans) more recent perfection of the instrument yields a visual display where the target is figured against a topographical ground" (55). Further, although scientific methodology (based as it is on traditional modern views of the...