Introduction: Human Perception and Digital Information Technologies

Summary

‘The body is our general medium for having a world.’

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (2002/1945:169)

The main theme of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's philosophy is ‘the world of perception’. He was interested in the world that appears to us via our bodily senses. The body is continuously communicating with the changing environment to shape our sense of the world. Yet the changing environment today is characterized by the digitalization of everyday life. In seeking to respond to this contemporary situation, this book seeks to better understand the ways that digital information technologies form and influence human perception and experience.

Contemporary computational media increasingly govern our experience through their capacity for externalizing our knowledge and memories, mining data from our behaviour to influence our decision-making, and also by creating emotionally rewarding sensory pleasure (Stiegler, 2015). The digital networks continue to expand their capacities, becoming faster, more efficient and more accurate. At the same time, their devices offer affective encounters. This is a particularly pressing issue that confronts us, given our growing dependence on computational platforms and software, which have become essential to contemporary everyday life and are now almost impossible to eliminate. In this light, it can be argued that the computational media embedded environment is becoming inseparable from embodied human experience.

The emergence of ChatGPT is clearly reinforcing this situation. As many have already discussed, ChatGPT can influence the human capacity for decision-making and knowledge formation. This new digital environment means that human perception is becoming a product of human– machine symbiosis in a new type of media ecology (a key issue addressed in Esther Leslie's piece, Chapter 1).

The expanding digital media environment has generated a large amount of research and scholarship within various fields that relate to digital information technologies, such as digital media, digital computation, digital archives, digital geographies (Ash et al, 2016), digital art, digital health, digital theatre and museums, big data, and data visualization.

For some, this suggests the possibility of a new ontology and epistemology for the social sciences and humanities that has led to the emergence of the digital humanities. The term digital humanities has been used since the early 2000s without, as yet, an established consensus about its definition among scholars. The term is, however, often used in various disciplines, such as sociology, media, art, philosophy, geography, and literature to incorporate digital information technologies into the research terrain.