Sam Schuler

Sam.Schuler@du.edu
WRIT 1633
John Tiedemann

iHumanism: How Google Glass Is Teaching Humans a New Way of Being

Historian Lynn Hunt argues that the idea of the human underlying human rights
philosophy is not grounded in a natural human essence; rather, early 18th-century middle class
Europeans learned new ways of being human by interacting with cultural artifacts such as the
epistolary novel and realist portraiture (Hunt 2008). Through the use of first-person narrative,
epistolary novels such as Richardsons Pamela granted middle-class readers entry into the
interior lives of the working classes, thus teaching readers the emotion of empathy. This new
emotion, Hunt argues, taught the middle classes to perceive, in Thomas Jeffersons words, that
all men are created equal. Similarly, Hunt argues, the vogue for realist portraiture taught
viewers to believe in the integrity of the body (Hunt), hence in personal autonomy. PreEnlightenment portraits depicted only members of the aristocracy, and often as figures from
classical mythology, thus reinforcing the belief that this world is but an allegorical expression of
another, higher order or being. But mid-18th-century galleries were filled with portraits of
ordinary, middle-class people, not depicted in the garb and scenery of myth, but in their own
clothing and homes, thus teaching viewers to see themselves and their world as inherently
valuable. Taken together, Hunt contends, these artifactual experiences created the emotional
framework in which the new discourse of human rights, with its belief in the inalienable rights of
equality and personal autonomy, came to seem as if it had always and obviously been true.

If the popularity of the epistolary novel and realist portraiture were responsible for the
evolution of the modern social order, then how are contemporary cultural artifacts affecting who
we are becoming today? Consider Google Glass: the computer that you wear like a pair of
glasses. Google Glass captures everything you see, hear, and say, projecting your thoughts and
perceptions to the world, while also sending to you what others are recording and allowing you
to gather still more information from the web. To wear Google Glass, then, is to turn yourself
into a global transmitter and receiver of information. As such, this technology is teaching users a
new way of being human: what I will call iHumanism. Whereas, per Hunt, the Enlightenment
notion of the human understood selves to be fundamentally individualistic and private,
iHumans see the self as fundamentally social, i.e., a source and destination for shared
information, and mediating, i.e., a public broadcasting and archiving service. On the one hand,
iHumanism may lead to positive, potentially revolutionary changes in the social order, as
artifacts such as Google Glass teach us to see ourselves not as isolated individuals but as nodes
in an open-ended, interconnected human web. On the other hand, however, iHumanism threatens
equally revolutionary, but potentially very negative changes, too, potentially trapping us in a
world where no experience is truly our own, and the twin Big Brothers of government and the
market are always watching us.

Works Cited
Hunt, Lynn. Inventing Human Rights. Online video clip. YouTube. YouTube, 7 March 2008.
Web. 24 March 2015. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZVD1G4q0bA>