Steve Mann is not recording me. This is unusual. Because we’re not meeting in person, I’m not captured by the computer he wears inside a pair of glasses, recording every aspect of his existence.
In fact, in a strange reversal of events, I’m recording our phone conversation. Mann would say that I’m engaging in what he would call sousveillance—but more on that later.
Mann is a tireless inventor. Most of his ideas come to him in dreams and then he starts tinkering. A musical instrument that’s played with water? Check. It’s called a hydraulophone and it began as a way to allow grown ups to play in the water. A people-sorting machine that could be used in hospitals or airports where an infectious outbreak needs to be contained? Check. It’s called Deconcourse and it was recently presented on Capitol Hill as a model for how the nation’s hospitals should deal with decontamination.
Mann has worn a computer—rendering him a cyborg—for 30 years. The modern model, having evolved from a bulky backpack-based prototype, is integrated into a normal pair of eyeglasses and is meant to be a seamless extension of the wearer. It replaces cell phones, iPods and other technology as well as uses sensors to monitor the health and well-being of the wearer.
Why bother? Because walls have ears—and eyes. And so should we, says Mann.
“All around us, we see technological changes in our environments. From washrooms with sensor-operated faucets and toilets to intelligent environments where buildings sense and respond to us. What hasn’t kept pace is technology on people.”
It’s a question of surveillance versus sousveillance. Surveillance, he says, is a larger entity watching a smaller entity—the camera on the ceiling recording events, for example. People have come to accept surveillance, but Mann wants them to start getting in on the action. Sousveillance means to watch from below refers to the act of recording an activity that you’re participating in.
Much of Mann’s work has been about empowering people to conduct sousveillance, whether it’s through wearable computers or via glogging, an abbreviation of cyborg logging, where the participant in an activity records and broadcasts it as it happens.
There are practical applications. “If you look at the growing population of elderly, you can imagine that it won’t be long before everyone’s wearing some kind of memory prosthetic that helps them record what they see and do.”
But his work is not about technology, he insists. In fact, the deconcourse began life in a gallery as an art installation. “Capturing life and sharing experience is universal and transcends technology,” he says. “People will use whatever medium is available today, next week, next year or in the next millennium.”
Is he an engineer or an artist? A scientist or an activist? Yes. He doesn’t care what you call him. For Mann, it’s all about fluidity, about “being undigital.”
“I always talk about fluidity versus digitization. I’m interested in undigital media—things that are continuous and free-flowing and interactional.”
We tend to throw around the word “digital” as a synonym for high-tech. Mann sticks to the literal meaning of the word, which is to take information and compartmentalize or break it into smaller pieces.
“The world has been digital for thousands of years,” he says. “The Greeks and Romans had a census, where they digitized people in a sense, where people were quantized or mapped.”
It’s easy to imagine Mann as a high-tech Little Dutch Boy with his finger in the dyke, holding back the forces of digitization as he insists on the primacy of human creativity and the importance of individual experience.
“Being undigital,” he says, “and transcending those boundaries is part of human nature.”