Interfaces and iPhones

I remember reading Descartes for an undergraduate class in philosophy—the last philosophy class I ever took. The answers conjured up by Descartes to the very questions that led me to take the class (i.e. what is reality and are perceptions real) I found to be beyond tedious. Descartes, for all his brilliant arguments, failed to recognize what any high school biology class made clear: the eyeball is an interface to the brain. By using the history of the stereoscope and camera to map our understanding of the how the human eye works, Schiavo traces our understanding of the eye as an interface, or as dictionary.com defines it, “a common boundary or interconnection between systems, equipment, concepts, or human beings.” In Schiavo’s words, “creating a situation in which we “see” that which is not really there, the stereoscope insinuated an arbitrary relationship between stimulus and sensation.” This means that the two are related in that the interface othrough which a stimulus is received will certainly affect its sensation.
In McLuhan’s “Laws of Media,” this argument is extended to “all man’s artifacts – whether language, or laws, or ideas and hypotheses, or tools, or clothing, or computers – are extensions of the physical human body or mind.” Certainly the stereoscope falls into this group, as do all other devices, such as guns, bombs, cars and birth control. McLuhan’s realization that “man has developed extensions for practically everything he used to do with his body” is not nearly as fascinating as how this has affected social relationships. His cited analogy between the emotional differences between a solider killing a child with petrol and a match versus dropping napalm from an airplane represents how the interface between two people affects emotions. In the case of the bomb, all senses (our integrated interfaces) are removed from the subject: the bomber is not going to smell the burning flesh, hear the screams of agony, or see the carnage up close. Unlike the stereoscope, the effect of the artificial interface no longer creates the same experience as the original.
This makes me consider the new iPhone by Apple. Rumors of its existence have been circulating through blogs for years, but until several months ago it was only subject of speculation. Part of the reason for wait was the extensive research and development of the phone’s interface. The importance of how the iPhone’s surface felt was essential; it could not smudge, it needed to be perfectly touch sensitive with an appealing surface, it needed to be intuitive, etc. The inverse of the bomb, the iPhone—a remote interface between two people conversing—was developed to compliment the interaction between natural interfaces (e.g. touch) and artificial media. This recalls Licklider’s “man-computer symbiosis.” If Licklider had seen the iPhone, his hope that “human brains and and computing machines will be coupled together very tightly” would certainly have come to fruition. That “the resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought” is maybe not so clear: an awful lot of automobile accidents happen as someone is arguing over a cell phone.