Miah, A. (2011) Ethical Issues Raised by Human Enhancements, in: Gonzalez, F. Ethics and Values for the 21st Century, BBVA Spain, 199-233 [Also in Spanish].
Introduction
Over the last 30 years, the evolutionary status and trajectory of the human species has been brought into question by rapid progress within the fields of nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and cognitive science. These NBIC sciences suggest ways in which technology could allow people to make themselves 'better than well' (Elliot 2003, Kramer, 1994) in such a way as to transform what we regard to be species typical functioning for humans. Such modes of enhancement may involve the modification of our brains to increase memory, reasoning, modification to our biology to make us more resilient to the environment or give us new capacities, life extension, or alterations to our appearance to make us more attractive or more aesthetically distinct.[i] Such interventions as laser eye surgery that can yield better than perfect, high definition vision, or the use of cognitive enhancers, such as Ritalin, to help students study for exams, each suggest how humanity is entering a transhuman era, where biology is treated as something to be manipulated at will, depending on one's lifestyle interests, rather than health need. Yet, questions remain about how far society is prepared to accept these kinds of applications and what ethical issues they creates.
The prospect of human enhancement has attracted considerable attention from bioethicists, the media and policymakers alike, each of whom have debated the ethical and moral desirability of such circumstances and the practical social and legal implications arising from a culture of human enhancement. Indeed, over the last 10 years alone, various governments have investigated these prospects, interested in understanding the magnitude of these trends for society. One cannot understate the breadth of these implications, as both advocates and critics of human enhancement agree that they will change fundamental parameters of human existence (Fukuyama 2002, Harris 2007). For instance, in a world where achievement is brought about more by technological intervention than effort, the entire system of justice that underpins society is brought into question. Alternatively, if a patient can request a doctor to ensure that their therapeutic intervention has an enhancing rather than simply reparative outcome, then the role of medicine and health care, along with the relationship between the doctor and patient changes considerably.
Determining the legitimacy and desirability of such changes is crucial to a global economy, as the transformation to healthcare and welfare that is implied by human enhancement, has critical implications for how society is organized. Thus, healthier people will mean the prospect of longer lives, which in turn will mean a growing, ageing population. This situation will have an impact on various social provisions and the broader economic infrastructure of a society, requiring people and governments to revise their expectations about the duration of the working life, the economics of pension funds, and the provision of health insurance. It may also influence what kinds of lives people lead, such as when they have children, or what kind of career they pursue. Thus, the consequences of human enhancement pervade all aspects of modern life, creating demands on social systems that may bring about their collapse, if they are not rethought. This is why it is important for governments to understand the rise of human enhancement technologies, in order to address their overarching implications for the future of humanity.
A number of important contributions to this debate have already been made from such diverse fields as philosophy, social science and public policy. As such, it is helpful to summarize some of the key concerns articulated by these contributions, before offering a critique and re-articulation of the key priorities that should concern future ethical, social, legal and policy debates in this area. However, before doing so, the first part of this essay provides some conceptual clarity on different types of human enhancement. This clarity helps to establish some overarching parameters to the ethical debate over which kinds of enhancement technology are appropriate for people to use.
What are Human Enhancements?
One of the difficulties with the human enhancement debate is the lack of consensus around what counts as an enhancement. It is often argued that the ethically questionable practice of human enhancements may be distinguished conceptually from the more accepted practice of human repair or therapy. However, it is misleading to suggest that medicine has always confined itself to just repair, or that there is agreement on the acceptability of how medicine is typically practiced today. Indeed, contemporary medical practice draws on a definition of health that is informed by the broader socio-cultural construct of well-being, which acknowledges that health care needs are not always about some physiological deficiency. Instead, they may be a matter of changing lifestyle conditions that could have an impact on health. Alternatively, such practices as in-vitro fertilization to treat infertility, abortion to avoid the possible psychological trauma of bearing a child, or physician assisted suicide to ease the suffering of people at the end of the lives, are each topics that are an established part of medical practice today. Yet, there is ongoing controversy about whether these interventions are consistent with the proper role of medicine.
Equally, it is untrue to presume that the conditions treated by therapeutic medicine can be detached from some lifestyle that a patient has led. Whether it is alcohol consumption, too much sun-bathing, smoking, lack of exercise, or playing high-risk sports, the lives people lead contribute to their eventual need for medical care. To this end, the proper role of medicine is the business of making people well for a particular kind of life they wish to lead, rather than just making people healthy in some general sense. For example, a dancer may need physiotherapy to treat an injury arising from their profession, or a student may need cognitive enhancers to address anxiety caused by the prospect of difficult exams. These examples reveal that it is often not possible to consider medical interventions that are divorced from social circumstances.
In this respect, one may identify two different definitions of health, one which relies on biomedical markers of medical need, and another which draws attention to the biocultural characteristics of ill health. For the former, one may be more inclined to discuss the biological indicators of good or ill health, while the latter will discuss health as a social concept, whereby medical intervention is explained with recourse to the social and cultural conditions that determine an assessment over whether a subject is leading a healthy life or in need of medical assistance. Good examples of this are various forms of disability which, beyond the medical treatment of the condition require various societal changes to ensure that the debilitating effects of the condition are not made worse by feelings of exclusion or inability to function within the social world.
In sum, it is erroneous to suggest that medicine proper simply treats people in a therapeutic way, insofar as this can be contrasted with enhancement. Indeed, medicine undertakes preventive measures with healthy subjects, before any health care need is apparent, as in the case of childhood inoculations. These examples reveal how humanity is generally predisposed to pursue new forms of medical intervention that can prolong survival, though these are not generally what are considered to be human enhancements. Consider another example - the fluoridation of tap water, which is commonly practiced in numerous countries which aim to reduce levels of teeth and gum decay. Over the years, the amount of fluoride within the drinking water of many countries has risen, as dietary habits and ingredients, along with dental hygiene standards may have decreased. However, the more general point is that from a purely economic perspective, one of the most effective contributions a nation may make to the oral health – and thus general health – of its citizens it is to include fluoride in the water. In each of these examples, we encounter medical interventions that test the boundaries between therapy and enhancement, but each reveals that the line is far from clear.
Additionally, one may even argue that the natural trajectory of medical practice is towards an era of human enhancements, as humans are rationally predisposed towards living long, healthy lives for as long as possible. Indeed, society's condemnation of suicide as an irrational interest is evidence of this fact. To put it another way, any person who values life will value its continuation and the pursuit of means that are likely to promote this possibility, which may broadly be defined as human enhancement technologies. Thus, the pursuit of these goals is consistent with the philosophical premise that a life worth living should be sustained for as long as is feasible.
The examples of fluoride in tap water or childhood inoculations also reveals the delicate balance required to ensure that any particular enhancement optimizes rather than harms humanity. Thus, too much fluoride in the tap water would have a harmful effect on people's health, as indeed could protection against a disease by vaccination which, in some countries may lead to a vulnerability towards another condition. Indeed, these examples are also characterised by a lack of consensus about their value. For instance, the fluoridation of water is considered by some to be unethical insofar as it prohibits the consumer to exert any degree of choice over the enhancement. Some countries have even decided to stop adding fluoride to tap water out of concern about its efficacy.
In any case, these examples are far removed from what many people typically regard to be the core content of the human enhancements debate, which is the improvement of biological conditions to such a degree as to bring into question whether the modified people are human at all. This may involve the creation of new human capabilities, that are achieved only by the technology, or the increased functionality of already familiar human capabilities. Each of these prospects suggests how technology may transform the species in such a way as to create a new, posthuman era and the presumed difference between such persons and today's populations, along with the expected loss of humanity that many have argued that it implies, is the locus for ethical concern. This is not to say that all forms of human enhancement involve scientific or technological manipulation. After all, some of the most effective means of enhancing humanity have very little to do with direct biological manipulation, such as education, a good diet or exercise.
In response, it is important to acknowledge how the biological characteristics of the human species have always been changing. Beyond the broad evolutionary point, the last 100 years has brought about dramatic changes in the living conditions that have brought about a transformation in what kinds of expectations people have about their health. In short, what is considered to be normal health today is radically different from what it was 200 years ago. Today, people in developed countries can expect to survive many previously life-threatening conditions, while life expectancy and even such biological parameters as height have changed considerably. Many of these changes have become constitutive features of modern medicine and have been achieved by scientific discoveries or insights that are, again far removed from debates about human enhancement, such as knowledge about sanitation and hygiene. Yet, these examples have certainly enhanced humanity, thus bringing into question, again, where one focuses the current debate about the ethical concerns arising from human enhancements.
There is also a normative challenge with the term human enhancement in that it may imply an evaluative judgement about something having been improved when, in fact, this claim is contested. Thus, while we may rightly conclude that having healthier teeth is, in one sense, an improvement of our life, the diminished autonomy that it implies by a nationwide fluoridation of drinking water may be regarded as, on balance, an unreasonable cost. To this extent, it is a value judgement, rather than an appeal to facts, as to whether the modification can be rightly regarded as an enhancement of humanity or not. Indeed, this concern appeals to the idea that it is not life circumstances in themselves that matter, but the means by which we come to enjoy them, a theme that will be explored further in the subsequent section.
In sum, various authors have attempted to derive a model for conceptualizing human enhancements. For example, Conrad & Potter (2004) study human growth hormone and identity three possible uses 'normalization, repair and performance edge' (p.184). Yet, often the debates about futuristic scenarios where humans have become some very different kind of species are conflated with the more immediate ways in which the therapy-enhancement distinction is creating new forms of wellness that, nevertheless, disrupt what we consider to be normal. Miah (2008) proposes such a typology of human enhancements that is divided into three principle categories, with further sub-divisions in the final category. This typology is modified in the following version, which builds on the 3 main categories, with further elaboration on their differences and, subsequently, clarification on how they assist in the ethical debate about human enhancements.
- Enhancing Health-Related Resilience (eg. fluoridation of tap water or inoculations)
- Enhancing Lifestyle Functional Capacities (eg. Breast enhancements, height enhancement)
- Enhancements Beyond Species-Typical Functioning
- Extending Human Capabilities (eg. height enhancement)
- Engineering New Kinds of Human Function (eg. changing colour, flight).
- Within the realm of known biological possibility (eg. flight capability)
ii.Outside of known biological possibility (eg. capacity to live in non-gravitational environments)
Importantly, this typology does not map neatly on to degrees of ethical concern. However, it does endeavour to convey a continuum of enhancements that begins with examples that are closely aligned with how medical practice operates today, towards interventions that may be practiced in the future. Equally, any single example of a technology may fit into any number of the categories depending on how it is used. For example, a prosthetic leg may provide a disabled person with mobility (Categories 1& 2 are engaged) or allow them to run faster than the biological counterpart (Category 3).
Among each of these categories and sub-categories there is considerable ambiguity over where a specific intervention might fit. More specifically, any single case of an intervention could fit into anyone of these categories, depending on its precise application. Consider an example that may fit into category 1 or 2 – physical exercise. Here, we might consider questioning the ethical appropriateness of a doctor's advocacy of exercise within a consultation, as either a health-related resilience enhancer, or an enhancer of lifestyle functionalities. After all, the evidence to support the claim that exercise optimizes health is complex. For instance, there are differences of opinion about how much exercise is optimal. Equally, society's need to reduce the burden of health care may lead to coercive tactics to ensure people exercise and this may be regarded as unethical. Thus, the development of health credits in the USA, which are connected to the amount of physical activity an individual undertakes may be seen as an unreasonable imposition on an individual's life. However, there would be little sense in discussing whether it is ethical or not for a person to choose to undertake exercise at all, should they believe it to improve their lives. Alternatively, denying treatment on the basis of not having led a lifestyle that deserves medical assistance – as in the case of decisions over rationing and smoking – may infringe upon the individual's right to be treated without prejudice.
In conclusion, this typology reveals the differences between ways in which one may conceptualize enhancements, beyond a simple binary distinction between therapy and enhancement. This may assist debates about the ethics of human enhancement by restricting discussion to only the relevant implications, rather than drawing too heavily on the broader rhetoric of futuristic transhuman scenarios.
The Ethical Issues
Ethical debates about human enhancements have taken place within various bodies of literature, including bioethics, animal ethics, environmental ethics, political science and the social scientific study of medicine. Each of these areas approach the significance of human enhancement from quite different perspectives. For example, Dvorsky (2008) argues that the capacity to enhance human biology must also imply an obligation to 'uplift' the capacities of other animals as well. Alternatively, bioethicists have argued that the possibility of human enhancement requires us to consider what sorts of people there should be, alluding to the prospective use of germ line genetic modifications or selection. To this extent, there is no single set of ethical issues that is engaged by all possible forms of enhancement. For example, enhancing an athlete's performance in sport may raise very different ethical concerns compared with enhancing a child's height to ensure it reaches a level that is closer to a population's average height. Alternatively, genetic enhancement is likely to have different implications from using a pharmaceutical product or a prosthetic device to yield a similar effect. Indeed, debates about the ethics of human enhancement are already so nuanced as to be focused on specific kinds of enhancement, such as neurological, biochemical, or physiological modifications.
As such, an overview of the ethics of human enhancement must first take into account the fact that one can, at best, provide only a compendium of general concerns that may be engaged by specific examples of enhancement. Equally, while some ethical concerns involve clearly identifiable stakeholders, for others they are much more diffuse. For example, if asking whether a doctor may facilitate an human enhancement for a patient, one would appeal to their professional code of ethics to assist in answering this question. Very few other stakeholders are relevant to this moral dilemma, though it may also involve appealing to the moral conscience of the doctor, as is often discussed in cases of abortion. In contrast, if asking whether germ-line genetic enhancement is morally sound, then it may be necessary to consider the interests of the patient along with other members of her family, community, society, and, perhaps even the entire world's population – along with future generations. This is because such interventions may have an affect on a much wider population, due to the possible transference from one generation to the next that such modifications imply.
Furthermore, it is necessary to clarify the relationship between moral and ethical, as they are often conflated within debates about human enhancement. Generally speaking, one would discuss ethical issues in the context of a specific practice community, such as the ethical code underpinning medical practice. Alternatively, morality is concerned with broader questions of value for which there may be no formal codes that are broken. For example, one might have a general moral concern about the prospect of a society compromised of genetically enhanced people, hough this may be come about without violating any specific ethical code. In cases of moral violations, it is more difficult to determine whether any specific principle has been violated by an action, or whether the moral concerns arising from this are, overall, outweigh the benefits that may arise from it. To this end, it is more difficult to derive an uncontested answer as to what people ought to do, which is why a common response to difficult ethical dilemmas is to rely on consensus of opinion, via some form of representative democratic decision. Nevertheless, one may find assistance in deriving ethical principles by studying human societies and the norms that have emerged around behaviour within culture. Through subjecting such discoveries to a process of reflective equilibrium, one may develop a clearer sense of the ethical principles that should govern decision making within practical contexts.
Given these complications, how ought one distinguish between types of ethical issue related to human enhancement? One approach is to treat human enhancements as any other form of biological modification and subject them to the same ethical scrutiny of the practice that facilitates the enhancement. For example, if the enhancement is to use autologous blood transfusions as a way of increasing stamina for an athlete who is running a marathon, then one may refer either the ethics of sports practices, or the ethics of medical practice to determine whether they are acceptable. Thus, one may refer to the ethical principles of sports or medicine, to ascertain whether the treatment can be undertaken without jeopardizing other values. However, one may also argue that the use of human enhancement is so different from all other forms of biological modification that it requires a completely different ethical framework from which to determine their acceptability. One may argue this case on the basis that, say, traditional medical ethical principles have been framed from the minimal interest to make people well, whereas the goals of enhancement are quite different. However, this exceptionalist approach finds a practical challenge in that many of the tools of human enhancement are regulated by those who hold the former view, whereby any use of a medical intervention for a non-medical purpose must satisfy the regulatory expectations of standard medical care. In this respect, it is unreasonable to expect a radical overhaul of this highly established system of governance over the use of new or established medical substances, products and methods. Indeed, change in this respect is even more unlikely when one takes into account the likely fragility of enhancements, which may require ongoing medical monitoring and possible correction.
An alternative route towards establishing an ethical framework of human enhancements is to examine how the debate has taken place thus far within a range of intellectual spheres – both theory and practice - and to provide some form of synthesis of the arguments and concerns. One of the challenges with this approach is that there is no consensus over which ethical issues are the most salient. Moreover, relying just on what has already been identified as a key ethical concern may overlook an essential issue that has yet to be discovered. Indeed, this approach has led to specific studies focusing on specific ethical concerns, to the omission of others. Nevertheless, a review of the literature reveals clear trends in what are seen by many commentators to be the key concerns and it is useful to build on this previous research. This is most adequately summarized in Allhoff et al. (2009), which frames the ethics of human enhancement under the following categories: Freedom & Autonomy, Fairness & Equity, Societal Disruption, Human Dignity & Good Life, Rights & Obligations, Policy & Law (ibid). Yet, one of the difficulties with this approach is that it does not distinguish between the different levels of decision making that operate around ethical dilemmas, from the individual to the societal.
In response, the following sections provide an overarching analysis of the various approaches to articulating the ethical issues that are engaged by human enhancements. It is structured in terms of three primary categories, which provide a useful heuristic through which to identify types of ethical concern. The assumption is not that these three domains can be neatly separated, but that there is value in categorizing ethical issues in terms of what Singer (1981) describes as the 'expanding circle' of moral concern. Thus, separating these concerns out into distinct units may assist in clarifying where the ethical dilemma resides and what kind of action – individual, professional or societal - is required An individual ethical issues relates directly to the interest of the subject who is undertaking the enhancement themselves. The professional concerns category relates to the individual or institution that is facilitating the enhancement, whereby there may be formal guidelines over ethical conduct. Finally, the societal concerns relate to the broad interests of society, which may be frustrated by the adoption of human enhancement.[ii] Within each of these categories, individual moral concepts are engaged in slightly different ways. For instance, an individual may consider whether they find it morally just to utilize cosmetic surgery for personal enhancement, while society may consider whether it will overall improve society to permit such surgery. In each case, the balance of reasoning will differ considerably, while the ethical principle may remain the same.
Individual Concerns
It should be considered uncontroversial to claim that there are good reasons for why human beings would want to enhance themselves generally. Indeed, as noted earlier, humans have always sought to enhance themselves, where some of the more familiar methods include education, exercise or a good diet. Undertaking these pursuits may lead to much greater capabilities than one would have and this may also lead to an advantage over those who choose not to indulge in such practices. To this end, what is it, if anything, that distinguishes these accepted methods of enhancement from those that cause moral concern, such as using drugs or the prospect of genetic modification? First, it is important to note that it is inadequate to devise moral rules that apply to people in general. Rather, people always operate within different social contexts, where different moral and ethical expectations exist. Thus, a university student may also be a musician, a youth group leader for a religious community, and a part-time sales assistant at a retail outlet. In each of these spheres, the moral expectations will change, while there may also be a sense of there being an abstract self-identity that operates across each of these domains. This is an important realization when attempting to determine what may be an ethical choice for someone to take, as any action may violate the ethical expectations of one practice, while not the other. Equally, it would be naïve to suggest that this university student can make general decisions about their well-being without being mindful of how it affects their ability to operate within either one of these practices. For example, using a cognitive enhancer to pass an exam may violate a university code of ethics – in actual fact, it is unlikely to - but it may be considered an enrichment of his performance within the orchestra, where there is greater ambivalence over the whether such use is ethical. The nuances of individual lives is an important reminder that there are not often formal ethical codes that govern our daily lives. Instead these are moral frameworks that may guide our actions or organize social conduct. Yet, in each case, there ma
Means Matter
One common argument that is used to challenge the value of human enhancement is to appeal to the idea that the means by which people achieve their goals in life matter. As such, if one adopts a technological shortcut to achieve some goal, then this may undermine its value. For instance, if one is a mountaineer and decides to reach the summit of the mountain by using a helicopter rather than one's body, then not only has the value of the achievement been undermined, but we might not even claim that a mountain has been climbed at all. This argument extends to many other forms of enhancement, from using coffee to make one more alert each day, to using cosmetic surgery to improve one's appearance. Yet, in these cases the degree to which these means matter varies considerably. For instance, if drinking coffee allows a scientists to reach a discovery that otherwise she would not have made, then we are unlikely to be concerned about this fact. Rather, our interest will be in the fact that a discovery has been made at all. Equally, if a person uses botulinum toxin (botox), or any form of cosmetic surgery to improve their appearance, in order to increase their chances of attracting interest from others – whether it is romantic or professional – then this is unlikely to arouse ethical condemnation. Certainly, it may invite moral criticism in its giving primacy to the value of appearance over other qualities, such as personality. However, in this area there exists considerable cultural differentiation, which limits the degree to which one would chastise such actions as being morally problematic. For, if one is willing to criticise the use of botox, then one may need also criticise other attempts to improve personal appearance, such as wearing expensive clothes, makeup or even smiling.
In each of these cases – the mountaineer and the botox user – there are no ethical rules that are violated, only moral concerns that may be engaged, or an ethos that may be violated by the modification. For example, the mountaineer community is not defined by a code of ethics, but there is an ethos in place whereby different expectations exist about how members practice the activity. To this end, it is unlikely to be a grounds for some form of prohibitive action from the state. Instead, there would need to be more serious harms arising to others for such cause to be required.
An Authentic Life
Closely allied to the concern about how one attains achievements is a concern that has been articulated often in relation to psychophmaracological substances, such as Prozac (Elliot 1999). In these cases, it is argued that they are morally undesirable forms of enhancement, as they will transform a person into somebody else and that this disconnection is logically undesirable. Such arguments are discussed in Elliott (1999), The Presidents Council on Bioethics (2003) and DeGrazia (2003). This may have something to do with the sociological concept of selfhood, which locates meaning within our lives in the various ways in which people cultivate their identities that, in turn, become the locus for moral concern. Indeed, Riss et al. (2009) discover that people are 'much more reluctant to enhance traits believed to be more fundamental to self-identity...than traits considered less fundamental to self-identity' (p.495).
This conclusion reinforces the earlier claim that there is no single ethical principle about any particular enhancement that one may appeal to in order to determine what may be ethically appropriate for people in general to do. After all, where one person may value their extroverted personality, another may loathe it. Nevertheless, to the extent that a life is lived in such a way as to limit the possibility to claim that it reflects the persona of a person, as opposed to a persona that is facilitated by a drug or other form of enhancement, it may be argued that this kind of life is less rewarding to live.
Open Future
A further reason for caution over any particular human enhancement is that it may unreasonably narrow one's prospects in life. While there may be some question over whether such modifications could legitimately be called enhancements, this alludes to the fact that an enhancement – like any health status – may have a limited life, or may improve only a fixed number of lifestyle choice one makes. This concern is similar to what some authors have also discussed in relation to the problem of irreversibility. In this case, whether an enhancement can be reversed may be reason for caution against its use, assuming that one may hold different aspirations in the future that are disabled by the enhancement.
This concern has similar scope to what some philosophers referr to as the principle of prudence, whereby decisions about actions are based on what are more likely to lead to long-term benefits, rather than short term gains. Thus, if a human enhancement were to promote success early in life, but lead to serious disability later, then one may caution against its use. A typical example of such ehanements may be the use of drugs that illicit a short term gain – perhaps stimulating creativity or physical strength – but which may also imply long term health riskss. In these cases, Feinberg (2007) argues that modifications which violate the principle of preseving as open a future as possible should be restricted.
Morphological Freedom
Despite these various concerns, some authors have argued on behalf of what Sandberg (2001) describes as 'morphological freedom', a concept that should trump other ethical preoccupations. In this case, the argument favours autonomy, arguing further that it should be a human right, rather than something that the state should aim to govern.
In closing, it is important to recognize that individual actions take place within specific social contexts, which can, in turn, dictate how one evaluates the moral content of any human enhancement. This may appear to be a morally relativist position, but it in fact acknowledges the possibility of universal moral rules, while recognizing that not all decisions are taken within the same conditions. This is best explained by providing two examples where the same kind of human enhancement is used. Thus, consider the creation of a new prosthetic leg, which may be used by two different people, one is an elite athlete, the other is not. If one assumes that, in both cases, the prosthetic device can make a person run much faster than any other person – whether or not they are considered disabled – then it is immediately apparent how, for the athlete, this may pose an ethical dilemma which is not evident for the non-athlete. The latter is interested in functionality, day to day living and is not in direct competition with any other person whom may feel that the new limb creates some form of unfairness. However, the athlete is engaged in a practice whereby the interests of the other participants may be frustrated by the use of this new technological device, in part because a prior agreement had been made between parties about how they would participate.
If one extends this case to other enhancements, it quickly becomes apparent how the conditions of the debate change. For example, consider the use of a cognitive enhancer, such as modafinil, which is used to treat narcolepsy, but which may be used in a non-therapeutic way to keep people alert for longer in periods of extreme tiredness. In this case, the athlete might, again, be undertaking a morally dubious practice, if they use it to improve their performance in competition. Yet in this case, the non-athlete may also be violating some sense of social justice, since it is difficult to claim that they are not, in some broad sense, in competition with other people in society. Whether the non-athlete is going to work a day job in bank, or is a Grand chess Master, the wonder drug disturbs the conditions of the competition whereby those who are not using it may be placed at a disadvantage. The banker may benefit from the enhancement in terms of winning promotion within his job or annual bonuses, whereas the chess Master may win global renown through beating all other opponents. Each is morally relevant and morally problematic.
The context of the ethical debate changes further when considering, say, the enhancement of a military personnel, where gaining an advantage over the opposition is less of an ethical matter and more of a strategic necessity. In this case, the ethics of war may permit the use of such enhancement technologies, but there may be good reasons for why the state should not permit its government to require soldiers to undertake such modifications, since this may undermine the soldier's right to choose or personal autonomy. Yet, one may argue that, by necessity, military personnel operate within a context where there is an acceptance of diminished autonomy – following orders etc, - perhaps justifying such use. Moreover, the use of drugs that otherwise would be unethical to give to a healthy subject may be life-saving in a military context. For example, a stimulant may allow a soldier in a period of sleep deprivation to continue their mission or avoid capture. In this case, one may debate the legitimacy of their having placed in this situation, but when faced with the circumstances, the ethical compromise of using a drug versus the fact of being captured seems a reasonable trade off.
There are many examples of human enhancement where the perceived benefits depend on the context. As such, one of the challenges in knowing whether it is wise to enhance is having certainty over the kinds of lifestyles that people may seek to lead. For instance, the agonizing practice of leg-lengthening that is increasing within China might be valuable if you aspire to be a Chinese politician – which stipulates a minimum height of 5ft 7in for men and 5ft 3in for women (Watts, 2004), but has limited value if one aspires to be a jockey. While there are undoubtedly very few Chinese politicians who subsequently seek to become jockeys, it is important to recognize that many enhancements will also close off the enjoyment of certain other lifestyle opportunities.
Professional Concerns
Human enhancements that rely on some form of scientific or technological adaptation also engage a range of professionals, whose conduct is governed by strict ethical codes. This may encompass the way in which research and development is underpinned by procedures that are necessary to follow before any particular technology can be used within society. Indeed, this is a crucial dimension of the human enhancement debate, as many of the ways in which people could enhance themselves will involve adapting interventions that are otherwise restricted to just therapeutic use by established regulatory authorities. Thus, in order for enhancement to be possible, it will be necessary to achieve consensus on the value of applying an otherwise medical intervention to the non-therapeutic or enhancing context. Clearly, this has taken place in some areas of life, particularly cosmetic or reconstructive surgery, which is a thriving commercial industry, though it is less clear that similar decisions would be made any time soon in many other areas, such as the use of known pharmaceutical products. Indeed, the challenge here is that one of the cornerstones of medical research is that it does not involve healthy subjects. In the case of enhancement, it may be necessary to develop products that are tested with otherwise health subjects in order to ensure they are safe for use. Alternatively, it may be that the way in which enhanced humans come into being will be through the use of therapeutic interventions – that is, for unhealthy subjects – whereby the intervention is able to elevate the level of functionality beyond the biostatistic norm.
One of the challenges with deciding whether a professional is in violation of their code of ethics when facilitating human enhancement is that the merit of the enhancement is ambiguous. For instance, it is reasonably uncontroversial to say that laser eye surgery is both beneficent and non-malfeasance and that he overall result improves the life of the client/patient. However, even laser-eye surgery has benefits for only a limited number of years after which the ageing process will most likely degrade vision inn such a way as to negate the positive effect of the surgery. Ion this case, there seems a reasonable trade-off. However, if the laser eye surgery were to exacerbate the degradation arising from the ageing process, then its merit may further be brought into question. Here again, one must expect that reasonable standards of safety and cost-benefit analyses are undertaken, but it is for the client to decide, which level of risk they choose to accept. In short, in the absence of certainty, individual autonomy is elevated as the guiding principle in such decisions.
Societal Concerns
Perhaps the primary ethical issues that govern the use of human enhancements relate to the societal governance of their use. Thus, in order for a number of enhancements to be available, it will require a range of decision-makers to develop policy that supports their utilization and will imply a social system whereby people can have affordable access to them. This is true whether or not the intervention involves a professional facilitator – as in the case of surgery – or the simple taking of an over-the-counter pill. In each case, some form of governance is likely, insofar as the effects of the modification are likely to affect the overall health fortunes of the individual.
Of course, if there are no harms at all arising from the enhancement, then this assumption will disappear and an entirely different structure of regulation will be required, if required at all. In any case, accepting that societies are likely to set rules around the use of enhancements, these decisions will precede most peoples decision about whether or not to use them. This aspect is also the reason why the development of human enhancements concerns a global community, as it is increasingly possible for people to undertake medical tourism to simply visit a country where the enhancement rules are more liberal. In such a situation, the ability to maintain a restrictive domestic policy may be more socially divisive than permitting such use.
Fairness & Justice
One of the initial concerns that is raised from a societal perspective about human enhancement is how they would be financed. Underpinning this concern are questions about fairness and justice. Thus, in a world where national health care systems struggle to make ends meet and where private health is often criticised to be overall detrimental to the common good, the prospect of using national funds to enhance people may seem to much of a stretch of resources and, potentially, contrary to the principle of social solidarity. Certainly, one would not expect the needs of people seeking enhancements to trump those who are seeking some kind of medical treatment for dysfunction or suffering arising from a health problem. However, one may argue further that making people better than well and, indeed, ensuring future generations are more resistant to illness, would, in the long term, ease the social burden of health care. On this basis, one may argue that a society cannot afford not to enhance humanity. This being true, human enhancements would be offered to all people on a similar basis to how national health care is offered, following principles of distributive justice. In turn, this would alleviate the concern about social divisions between wealthy and poor, which may otherwise be exacerbated by a society of privately funded enhancements. By implication, it would go some way to avoiding a situation where people are discriminated against on the basis of poor genetics, since enhancements will be available to all.
The Yuck Factor
A further societal concern that is often invoked is that changing humanity by human enhancement would undermine some essential quality of our human identity that we would wish to preserve. This may otherwise be described as the argument from naturalness (Barilan 2001; Reiss and Straughan, 1996; Takala 2004), though there are subtle differences. Thus, a concern that human enhancement may be contrary to some natural essence may not imply a revulsion for artifice, but it may reveal an underlying intuition that there is something about human biology that ought not be changed for fear of altering something that either corrupts some fundamental part of human identity. Even if the 'yuck factor' is a difficult to articulate, some philosophers have argued that such a deep-seated intuition has moral weight when deciding whether or not to undertake biological modifications such as enhancements. Notably, Kass (1997) describes this as 'the wisdom of repugnance', though it is a view that many have criticized. Probing further into this concern, one finds a reliance on such concepts as 'human dignity' which are invoked to claim that there is a fundamental quality to human sensibility that must both be preserved by elevating certain rights, but which may also be violated by altering biology too much (Fukuyama 2002).
There are other moral concerns that are often folded into this fear over biotechnological change, notably the view that undertaking such changes is akin to 'Playing God'. In this case, the moral anxiety describes a concern that undertaking such changes oversteps some sense of the delimited authority of humanity over its evolutionary trajectory. In short, the argument states that since humans have no oversight in their own evolutionary trajectory, it would be foolish to attempt actions that would, as Harris (2007) describes it, enhance evolution. Arguments of this kind of often – mistakenly I would argue – discussed in the context of eugenics and the idea that state wide policies to engineer people would invoke the kinds of moral monstrosities that are associated with Nazi germany, human experimentation and the general disregard for certain kinds of people over others.
Practical Concerns
There are a number of practical ethical probems associated with human enhacnement that desire special mention. For example, if societies are unable to impleent effective regulation of human enhancements, then this may provide a moral reason for restricting use. One form of argument in this area is the 'slippery slope' argument, which states that it would be morally undesirable to provide permission to undertake the desirable action X, if the regulatory structure is unable to prevent claims to also undertake the socially undesirable action Y (Burg 1991; Resnik 1994). Equally, an inability to restrict the scrutiny of the state may be a further reason for moral concern over enhancements. For example, the use of memory enhancements may be desirable for some people, but it may be undesirable to permit the state to require an individual to undertake a memory enhancement in order to pursue some national interest. Wagenaar (2008) discusses this case in the context of judicial hearings where they may be an argument favouring forced memory enhancements in order to ascertain the truth about a crime. Finally, there may also be reasons of safety that lead to restrictions of use, such as the levels of toxicity that may be released into the environment when using human enhancements or the possible, unforeseen risks associated with any particular use.
The Zero Sum Problem
A final concern relates to the efficacy of human enhancements, though not from an individualist perspective. Indeed, while it is possible that increasing height or speed could yield benefits for the individual concerned, but in a society where all people undertake similar enhancements, then the overall benefit is nullified. Instead, the long term consequence of this permissive enhancement culture is simply a shift in what is biologically normal and in an economy where having exceptional talents or capabilities is required in order to flourish, the eventual outcome of a society where all have access to enhancements is a zero-sum game, where there is, in fact, little change to the overall fortunes that people experience.
Of course, not all enhancements are like this. A world where everyone is more intelligent will have a cumulative benefit for society, unless of course there is a trade-off between characteristics, say where increased capacity for logic is to the detriment of an ability to empathize with people or where altruism decreases. While there is no evidence to support this concern, it is important to be mindful of the complexity of some neurological constructs – such as intelligence – which may imply improving the functionality of a number different forms (emotional intelligence, rational intelligence), before one can reasonably claim that it has been improved.
Conclusion: What should we do?
To conclude, there remain a number of practical and moral obstructions to the widespread use of many human enhancements. Many cultures still struggle to regulate the health care system for the purpose of making people well and this should provide caution to those who consider there to be a simple route towards an effective regulate of human enhancements. When establishing ethical guidelines, it is crucial to clarify the perspective from which the question is being asked, in order to understand the breadth of the ethical concern invoked by human enhancements and the scope of answers. If the matter is of personal morality alone, then it will not be necessary or ethical appropriate to involve professionals within such choices. In turn, a matter that concerns society at large should take precedence over individual morality.
At all levels, it is crucial to establish some general principles that govern ethical conduct of human enhancement. These should involve widespread, independent consultation and investment into research principles. Equally, one may derive some minimal conditions of ethical practice that are informed by other forms of medical intervention, such as the promotion of autonomy, concern about justice and welfare and so on. Finally, perhaps the most pressing issue is the degree to which the use of human enhancements requires a global response, rather than just domestic policy. While such work has become from research leadership in a number of countries around the world, there is still much more to achieve before either a clear sense of the global implications of human enhancement has been achieved, as well as a reasonable strategy has been formulated.
References
Allhoff, F., Lin, P., Moor, J., Weckert, J. (2009) Ethics of Human Enhancement:
25 Questions & Answers, National Science Foundation.
Barilan, Y.M. & Weintraub, M. (2001) The Naturalness of the Artificial and Our Concepts of Health, Disease and Medicine. Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy, 4 (3), p.pp.311-325.
Conrad, P. & Potter, D. (2004) Human growth hormone and the temptations of biomedical enhancement, Sociology of Health and Illness, 26(2), 184-215.
Burg, W. van der (1991) The Slippery Slope Argument. Ethics, 102 (1), p.pp.42-65.
DeGrazia, D. (2003) A Reply to Bradley Lewis’s “Prozac and the Post-human Politics of Cyborgs.” Journal of Medical Humanities, 24 (1/2), p.pp.65-71.
Dvorsky, G. (2009) All Together Now: Developmental and ethical considerations for biologically uplifting nonhuman animals, Journal of Evolution and Technology, 18(1), 129-142.
Elliott, C. (1999) A Philosophical Disease: Bioethics, Culture and Identity, London: Routledge.
Elliott, C. (2003) Better Than Well: American Medicine Meets the American Dream, New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company.
Feinberg, J. (2007). `The child's right to an open future', in R. Curren (ed.) Philosophy of Education: An Anthology. Malden, MA: Blackwell
Harris, J. (2007) Enhancing Evolution: The Ethical Case for Making Better People. Princeton University Press.
Fukuyama, F. (2002) Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution, London: Profile Books.
Jeungst, E.T., Binstock, R.H., Mehlman, M., Post, S.G., & Whitehouse, P. Biogerontology, 'Anti-Aging Medicine,' and the Challenges of Human Enahcnement, Hastings Center Report, July-Aug, 21-30.
Kass, L. (1997) The Wisdom of Repugnance, Th New Republic, pp.
Kramer, P. (1994) Listening to Prozac, London: Fourth Estate.
Miah, A. (2008) Engineering Greater Resilience or Radical Transhuman Enhancement, Studies in Ethics, Law and Technology, 2(1), 1-18.
The President’s Council on Bioethics (2003) Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness.
Reiss, M.J. & Straughan, R. (1996) Improving Nature?: The Science and Ethics of Genetic Engineering, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Resnik, D. (1994) Debunking the slippery slope argument against Human Germ-line Gene Therapy. Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, 19 (1), p.pp.23-40.
Riis, J., Simmons, J.P., Goodwin, G.P., Simmons, J.P. & Goodwin, G.P. (2009) Preferences for Enhancement Pharmaceuticals : The Reluctance to Enhance Fundamental Traits Preferences for Enhancement Pharmaceuticals : The Reluctance to Enhance Fundamental Traits. Journal of Consumer Research, p.pp.495-508.
Sandberg, A. (2001) Morphological Freedom - Why We not just want it, but Need it. In Berlin, p.http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/Texts/MorphologicalFre.
Savulescu, J., Meulen, R.T., & Kahane, G. (2011) Enhancing Human Capacities. Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford
Singer, P. (1981) The Expanding Circle: Ethics and Sociobiology, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1981.
Takala, T. (2004) The (Im)Morality of (Un)Naturalness. Cambridge Quarterly of Health Care Ethics, 13, p.pp.15-19.
Wagenaar, W.A. (2008) Enhancing Memory in the Criminal Trial Process, in Zonneveld, L., Dijstelbloem, H. & Ringoir, D. Reshaping the Human Condition: Exploring Human Enhancement, Rathenau Institute, The Hague, pp.65-75.
Watts, J. (2004) China’s cosmetic surgery craze. The Lancet, 363 (March 20), p.p.958.
Zonneveld, L., Dijstelbloem, H. & Ringoir, D. Reshaping the Human Condition Exploring Human.
Miah. A. (2011) The Worth of the International Olympic Academy. 50th Anniversary book of the International Olympic Academy, IOA Greece.
Besides having watched the Olympic Games as a child, my first encounter with the Olympic movement was through my university education at De Montfort University, which led me to the British Olympic Foundation’s National Olympic Academy. However, my formative experience was at the International Olympic Academy International Postgraduate Seminar in 2000. Having since returned to the Academy numerous times, I have often wondered how the movement would be different, if only everybody involved had the chance to experience it through the Academy first.
The IOA is a place that changes peoples’ lives and mine was no exception. I met my wife Dr Beatriz Garcia during the postgraduate seminar who has been my constant companion in all Olympic matters. Our first child Ethan was born 10 years later, almost to the day we met.
Since then, I have been fortunate enough to return to Olympia on numerous occasions, as coordinator of the Postgraduate Seminar, lecturer at the HEI session, spectator at the Athens 2004 Olympic Games, supporter of Scholars for Olympia, and twice Professor of the Postgraduate Seminar.
It is my honour to have the chance to write for its 50th Anniversary book and this task is unlike any other writing opportunity I have had. As a philosopher, I am inclined to think about my contribution in philosophical terms and I would like to consider how we should value the worth of the IOA, while enriching these ideas with my own experiences.
My memories of the Academy are replete with extraordinary experiences. For instance, in 2000, my fellow postgraduate students and I attended the lighting ceremony for the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games and shared the Academy with some of its performers. Further, watching an actual Olympic competition in the ancient stadium during the Athens 2004 Games was profound, as it was the first time an Olympic competition had taken place there since ancient times. Indeed, the intimate geographical connection between the stadium and the Academy reinforces the worth of each.
Yet it is often in the most familiar, every day experiences that the value of the Academy is most persuasively articulated. This is largely because what makes it special is the people. First, there is the Academy’s staff, from the President to the cleaners, all of whom create a sense of family that is felt by all visitors. Second, there are the supervising lecturers whose generous interventions exceed expectations. Finally, the interactions between students define life at the IOA. From debates about the ethics of doping, to ideas about what it must have been like to run naked in the ancient stadium - some more vivid than others – the every day interactions at the IOA is where the life-changing experience begins.
These elements create the unique programme that the IOA delivers. Beyond the formal lecture schedule, the space allocated to free time is an essential part of its worth. Most of the people who attend are of an age where they are highly motivated, capable people and the Academy’s recognition that they can be given freedom to create experiences for themselves, represents the best pedagogic principles that any educational institution would be proud to implement. In each session, student committees are formed to develop social and sports programmes, which neatly complement the formal learning that takes place through lectures and seminars. The additional tours through Greece to ancient sites make the IOA experience unlike any other. I was lucky enough to take part as an athlete in the Nemean Games of 2000, overseen by archaeologist Professor Stephen Miller and the experience united the theory and practice of learning in a way that is beyond compare.
The location of the Academy in Olympia adds further worth and, apart from being a beautiful, inspiring setting. This secluded and remote location creates a distinct learning experience and a commonly shared willingness to retreat to serving just fundamental human needs. This insulation from the outside world also promotes opportunities for rich international encounters among the Academy’s uniquely diverse community. The importance of this was brought into sharp focus in recent years, when the rise of the Internet meant that the Academy could become part of a global community. When I was a student at the Academy, this period was just beginning. I recall that there was one computer with internet access, where now there is an entire room and wifi across the campus. Opinions vary about whether this has enriched the IOA experience, or whether it has risked endangering the value of the Academy’s remoteness. In any case, the realization that having Internet access provides a valuable insight into the world for students coming from countries with limited internet access, seems to be a further contribution that the Academy now makes to education.
In addition to the digital revolution, the IOA has lived through many eras and its history is also what gives it legitimacy as the ultimate authority of Olympic education. When the fires of 2007 struck Greece, I joined the Scholars for Olympia initiative, which gathered academics from around the world to visit the Academy and demonstrate our ongoing appreciation and support for its contribution to Olympism. During this visit, we spent time with the local villagers to acknowledge their brave acts, thanks to whom the Academy was saved from certain ruin. The fires devastated Olympia, but the buildings of the Academy remained largely unscathed, as if to suggest that the historical significance of the IOA could not be extinguished by even the greatest natural threat. As well, the fact that the memorials dedicated to Pierre de Coubertin, John Ketseas and Carl Diem remained standing, conveyed an opportunity to remember the past and consider the possibility of renewal, as indeed forest fires often are.
Each of these elements lead me towards concluding that the Academy’s primary value is found in the way that it inspires people towards participating in the Olympic movement. Since my first visit in 2000, I have also been fortunate enough to attend 6 Olympic Games – Winter and Summer – at which I always am surrounded by people within the extended Olympic family. The International Olympic Academy Participants’ Association always manages to reunite us during Games time, providing a welcome respite from the chaos of the Olympic city and a reminder of Academy life.
While the tangible impacts of the Academy are salient, its intrinsic value should not be overlooked. In the most beautiful way, the Academy is a small part of Ancient Greece and a reminder of the origin of Olympic values that is inextricable from Pierre de Coubertin’s vision. The fact that his heart lays here within the Academy walls is the ultimate testament to this fact.
The generosity of the Hellenic Olympic Committee, the Presidents and Deans of the Academy who have developed such an enduring commitment to the programme over 50 years is second to none. I began my experience under the Deanship of Dr Kostas Georgiadis and his support over the years has been unwavering and I would like to add a note of personal thanks to him for bringing me – and now my students – through the Academy.
During the IOA’s postgraduate seminar, all students make a presentation about their research and, as I was the last, I invited everyone out of the classroom to gather by the swimming pool, a crucial agora of the Academy. This singular experience captures the entirety of what the Olympic experience should entail – the fusion of sport, culture and education and it remains one of my fondest memories of time there making life-long friends.
Miah, A. (2011) The Future of Musical Intelligence, in Miranda, E. Mozart Reloaded. Sargasso Publishing.
It may be no coincidence that Eduardo Miranda refers to his compositions as ‘recombinant’ processes, as this concept alludes to a way in which we might regard them as forms of biotechnological mutation, engineered to bring about new species categories. After all, Miranda’s work leads to the existence of new forms of musical experience and new ways of thinking about composition and creativity.
As with any biological mutation, the role of the creator in these compositions is difficult to specify. While certain processes begin with clearly defined interventions, the creative work also takes on a life of its own, intervening and changing the course of the final creation. We may even think of artwork generally in a similar way, whereby the artist’s influence on the final composition is understood as only one part of the series of processes that lead to the final work. When utilizing artificial intelligence to create art, this ambiguity is even more apparent.
Miranda’s compositions may be the first to answer the complex question of whether machines could ever approximate the kind of intelligence required to create music. In so doing, his work extends a number of discussions that have taken place in recent years about the possibility of artificial intelligence, the role of science and art collaborations, and what it is to be human.
When discussions about artificial intelligence gained prominence back in the 1950s, scientists, most notably Alan Turing, developed elaborate tests to ascertain what would count as intelligence. Turing’s classic test specifies that, if it is possible for a computer to fool a human being into believing that it is also human (through conversing on a computer screen), then we must conclude that the computer has the same degree of intelligence as a human.
Many have disputed his proposition. For instance, Searle considers that Turing’s test is misleading and, instead, analogizes it to his now famous “Chinese room” interpretation. Here, Searle asks that we imagine a room with a person in it who receives Chinese symbols through a slot in a door. The person has a manual that allows him or her to match up the Chinese symbols with the English counterpart and thus, the person can output the translation. To anyone outside of the room, it would appear that the person has translated the Chinese words and thus understands their meaning. In actual fact, the person has demonstrated merely a capability for pattern matching and has no real understanding of the meaning of the Chinese symbols.
Thus, Searle argues that, even if the computer were able to fool another human into believing that it was talking to another person, this would not indicate intelligence. Instead, it would show how a computer program is able to demonstrate a grasp of syntactic rules, thus appearing intelligent through a comprehensible conversation. However, Searle contends that it would lack any comprehension of the semantic quality of words, including those ascribed to the emotions, which are considered as constitutive of that which defines human intelligence.
The example reveals a disparity within research about artificial intelligence that is premised upon its artificiality standing against some, supposedly, natural intelligence. Furthermore, such natural intelligence tends to be directed towards that exhibited by a human being. Thus, it implies that if anything should be considered intelligent, then at least we must grant that humans are.
Since Searle, few tests of intelligence have examined the creative process or the creation of art, as a way of establishing whether machines are now intelligent in the same way as humans. Moreover, the role of AI in creating musical compositions is a very new contribution to the debate about what we should understand as intelligence. Yet, the key question remains the same: If only machines could create beautiful music, would we then be willing to credit them with the kind of intelligence that matters to humans and, if so, what would this mean?
We may accept that a number of forms of human intelligence could be replaced by the work of machines. Indeed, the industrial revolution was the beginning of this process. Over one hundred years later – and 200 years since the Luddite uprising against technology - it is clear that humans still have a role to play in their societies, but this role has changed. In developed countries, the work force has shifted away from manual to intellectual tasks. However, in the last twenty years, even these aspects of our contribution have become increasingly unnecessary, as technologies such as the Internet have created a meta-mind, capable of yielding all forms of knowledge.
Thus, Miranda’s work addresses the last bastion of human relevance, the capacity to make art and for it to provide insight and meaning that conveys what matters to us about being human. In a world where the creation of music may no longer require participation from humans, then we may truly accept that our unique selling proposition has been compromised.
However, this would be too simple an interpretation of the work, and the age-old thesis that artificially intelligent machines would make humanity redundant needs considerable revision. These compositions provide such a reinterpretation, suggesting how creative collaboration between machines and humans may provide a new chapter in our thoughts about artificial life forms.
They also suggest how the role of the scientist may be changing, as the boundaries between scientist and artist are collapsing. Over the last 10 years, numerous artists have begun to work within science to explore ways in which biology might be utilized as an artistic medium. These works vary remarkably, from the transgenic fluorescent rabbit of Eduardo Kac, to the surgically sculptured, stem-cell-generated human ear by Stelarc.
Thus, Miranda’s compositions must also be situated within a range of innovations taking place within the fields of art and science today, whereby the role of each form of expertise is becoming increasingly fuzzy. It also speaks of the broader history in experimental music, which encompasses such artists as John Cage, Steve Reich, Laurie Anderson, Kraftwerk, and Maywa Denki, each of whom may be seen as musicians and technicians.
In this respect, we must also note how developments within popular music, which – perhaps since the Beatles – have shifted towards the manufacturing of commercial music products, as if to suggest that artistic insight is made rather than discovered. Perhaps the pinnacle of this era was reached in 2005, with the Japanese girl band AKB48, consisting of around 50 members was created. This idol band consists of 3 teams of girls, who rotate live performances creating a band that will outlive the lifetime of its members by continually replacing performers with new, cloned singers and dancers.
Would we feel confident in claiming that the countless boy and girl bands that have emerged through such media systems as X Factor or American Idol demonstrate any greater creative value than the music created by artificially intelligent computers? I suspect not, but in the same way that contests between robots are not as interesting as contests between humans, computer generated music must find its own route into culture, as has been accomplished by other musical forms.
As Miranda’s compositions demonstrate, none of these developments mean spending any less time learning to read music or play instruments, quite the contrary, they rely on an advanced knowledge of such practices. Instead, it means that reading music may be an art cultivated in parallel with learning computer programming, neuroscience and even some molecular science.
Professor Andy Miah, BA, MPhil, PhD, is Director of the Creative Futures Research Centre and Chair of Ethics and Emerging Technologies at the University of the West of Scotland. He is also a Global Director for the Centre for Policy and Emerging Technologies (Washington, DC), Fellow of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, USA and Fellow at FACT, the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology, UK.
@andymiah
http://www.andymiah.net
http://creativefutur.es
The Google Art Project and the Missing Net Art Movement
The Google Art Project launched this week, bringing the technology of Google street view indoors to internationally renowned gallery spaces. Viewers can now browse classic collections in hyper-real gigapixel quality, without having to leave the comfort of their computer chair.
The project creates a whole new world, perhaps even a Second Life and, soon, we'll all stop visiting art galleries and encountering reality in virtual worlds. This all sounds very familiar. The future has arrived - again. Or has it?
There is no denying that the experience of Google Art is incredibly engaging or that it provides a unique art experience that most people could never enjoy. This is due largely to the fact that most highly valuable paintings always remain slightly out of our reach, positioned behind glass, wires or, in the case of the Mona Lisa, behind a beautifully carved wooden fence, a safe distance from the pollution of human touch or even breath.
Through the Google Art Project, browsers can zoom into every tiny millimeter of a painting and even see the cracks in the paint, perhaps discovering aspects of the work that were previously impossible to perceive. It brings a whole new layer of experience to art appreciation and this is its primary achievement. As well, there's a good chance that this will improve the footfall at these galleries rather than lead people to stay at home.
Yet, what troubles me about the Google Art project is the massive disconnection between which art it delivers and what has taken place in the art world over the last two decades. One might have thought that a company that has been defined by the Internet era would place some value on the artists that have shaped its community. Admittedly, a lot of these people are not particularly enamored with the success of commercial web giants like Google. Still, an acknowledgement of the way that the Internet has been defined by such artists as Heath Bunting, Jodi or any number of new media artists http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_art would have been an enterprising gesture.
Of course, Google may not want to celebrate the work of such artists as Steve Lambert, whose collaborative 'AddArt' project replaces all advertisements in web browsers with art work. But it really should. Such interventions are what has made the Internet so engaging over the years. Indeed, time and again, its value is evidenced by such politically charged matters, as evidenced by WikiLeaks or the recent coverage of the Egyptian uprising.
In addition to simply championing classic art works, Google could bring the cutting edge of art innovation to art lovers, re-defining how people make sense of art and influencing what people are willing to identify as beauty.
Most new media art does not tend to reach the kinds of people that typically frequent the galleries assembled in the Google Art Project. One exception is taking place in Liverpool this month, a collaboration between the UK's new media art institution FACT and TATE Liverpool. In a joint exhibition celebrating the pioneering media artist Nam June Paik, the two institutions are doing the kind of work that Google Art Project could be doing - bringing avant garde work into the mainstream art territory. These two institutions - at opposite ends of Liverpool, the host city for this year's international Media Art History conference - are even connected by Peter Appleton's green laser beam, which stretches high across the city, generating a powerful symbolic message about the need for art to work harder to foster new audiences.
The web is a wonderful medium through which boundaries collapse, not just physical, but also sociological, political and aesthetic. Google's art project is out of sync with the values of the digital revolution. Moreover, the absence of new media artists means that it may not be long before hackers find a way to add graffiti to these digital collections or simply seek use them to make statements about what art experiences ought to offer in the 21st century. Certainly, it should include what the GAP presently offers, but it can go so much further at changing our relationship to art, in the way that Google's Search Engine has changed our relationship to information.
Miah, A. & Jones, J. (2011) Virtual Worlds, in Barnett, G. Encyclopedia of Social Networks, SAGE.
"The term “Virtual World” is commonly used to describe the spaces inhabited by people in computer mediated environments, within which it is possible to interact with objects and others via text, audio, computer generated images, or film. When thinking about social networks, visions of virtual worlds occupied the imagination of early literary and academic authors. Its origins can be found in literary fiction such as William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer (1984) where ‘cyberspace’ is imagined as:
a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators. . . A graphic representation of data abstracted from the bank of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights receding (Gibson, 1984: 67)
Gibson’s vision of virtual worlds has been articulated in various forms, from the futuristic film The Lawnmower Man (1992) and The Matrix (1999) to Avatar (2009). Each of these visions focuses on the enhanced social networking between people that is achieved via digital technology. Often, this interaction occurs via an ‘avatar’, which broadly describes a device that is used to represent the identity of the user, whether or not this identity has any real-world resemblance. The possibility of creating one’s identity online has led to a considerable amount of research focusing on how identity is made manifest in virtual worlds and what this might reveal about people. In the last five years, the growth of social networks may be attributed in large part to the growth of new virtual worlds, such as Facebook, Twitter and Second Life, which command vast audiences and achieve a degree of global – if regionally specific - connectivity between individuals that is unrivalled. Indeed, the model of the social network within such worlds transforms traditional media formats, where broadcasters control the channels of communication. The social networks of the virtual world provide individual users with the means of communication and even encourage participants to alter the spaces to optimize connectivity.
Historical Context
The history of virtual social networks now spans over three decades, though the principles of virtual interactivity are rooted in other, more long-standing social technologies, such as books, film, music and so on. To this end, the idea of living in a virtual world may be understood figuratively, where the human capacity to negotiate space as a psychological apparatus, rather than a physical reality, has been a feature of human experience for centuries. From the science of dreams to ancient Greek mythology, the concept of virtuality may be applied to a far wider range of lived experiences than just computer mediated communities. Indeed, one may consider digital virtual worlds as an extension of these other, older forms.
Nevertheless, the term virtual world has modern currency in the context of computer environments and draws attention to our social experiences that take place outside of physical environments. Indeed, so varied have these experiences become that, over the last twenty years, it has become necessary to distinguish between different eras within the computer revolution. Each of these eras demarcates varying degrees to which the world has been affected by computer culture. This impact is made most explicit in Mainzer (1998) who argues that the developed, industrial world exists within the second or maybe the third computer age, where it has moved away from the inanimate processors that described the calculating machines of previous decades, to a much more interactive computer experience, where machines learn, become life-like, and perhaps, autonomous (Kelly, 1994).
Over ten years since Mainzer, the commercialization of virtual worlds has become a global phenomenon, used as widely in underdeveloped countries, as they are in postindustrial societies. Indeed, while still limited claims might be made about the most advanced uses of digital technology, the growth in terms of worldwide penetration continues to build. Notably, in 2008, Internet access in China outstripped that of the USA, the leader until that point. With over 500 million mobile phone users in China, many of whom will have internet ready devices, this number is also growing quickly.
Early examples of virtual worlds included chat-rooms, or immersive worlds (referred to as Multi User Dungeons), which brought about a fundamental shift in how people created and experienced human communication (Haraway, 1985; Turkle, 1995). Such environments reinforced the claim that humanity was entering a postmodern era, where identity is fragmented and where grand narratives about such constructs as the family, generational boundaries or sexuality, for example, are disrupted (Rojek, 1995). Simple examples of such disruption is the increased number of communities to which someone may belong, which far outstrips the way membership to a community operates in a pre-virtual world. In other words, virtual worlds have permitted people to escape from the values and constraints of lived, physical culture, both in terms of its commodification and its conventions (Rojek, 1993). To this end, computer culture can be seen as an empancipatory device, through which one can go anywhere and do anything.
Second wave cybercultural theorists have criticized these stories about virtual worlds by drawing attention to the lack of evidence to support the claims that they allow us to transcend physical world boundaries. Alternatively, others have raised questions about the credibility of claims that social networks can be constituted by such diverse and widespread communities. For example, Rob Dunbar claims that people can, at best, maintain meaningful human relations with up to 148 people, beyond which it becomes harder to claim that the relationship has any significance in the person’s life. So, as some users build so-called ‘friend’ connections with over 5,000 people in social networking platforms like Facebook, Dunbar’s number brings into question the meaningfulness of such associations. Alternatively, the idea that virtual worlds are devoid of the burden of physicality is easily dismissed when studying the communicative grammar of virtual world interactions. For example, it is common for people chatting to strangers in virtual worlds to start a conversation with ‘asl?’, asking for the age, sex and location of the person. Such language reinforces the idea that place and space still matter online, which leads to a further focal point for research – that of how people negotiate anonymity.
Anonymity had been a guiding principle of virtual world interactions for many years, where the nature of the experience was such that users did not need to reveal their identity unless they wished. In the early years, virtual worlds were wholly reliant on text, until graphical interfaces were developed in the mid 1990s. To this end, identity deception was very straightforward. Only in recent years, with the rise of social media, has there been a return to heightened visibility of identity in cyberspace, where people are both, required to and prefer to reveal as much about their offline identities as possible. Thus, such web platforms as Flickr (a photo sharing environment) and YouTube (a video sharing environment) have transformed how people play with identity in virtual worlds.
As such, the claim that virtual worlds permit users to transcend historically bounded concepts of identity – such as nationality, gender and race – is considered by Vincent Mosco to be a myth. Mosco reinforces Roland Barthes’s concept of historical inoculation, the admission in which a little caution can be used to protect the self from a substantial attack. In relation to cyberspace and virtual worlds, Mosco argues that people attempt to transcend the limitations of their present-day communication technologies and, instead, favour the ability to ignore them whilst believing that cyberspace is providing a rupture in history, a move towards virtual transcendence.
In contrast, one of the strongest advocates of the emancipatory potential of cyberspace is Howard Rheingold who considers how virtual worlds have made possible new kinds of human experiences. Researchers like Rheinghold have described virtual realities as spaces of boundless freedom, which transcends human subjectivity and where identity becomes no longer burdened by the prejudices of physical difference. In the case of virtual worlds, Rheingold refers to virtual communities, defining them as a product of social aggregation, based on the personal relationships formed within cyberspace. The relevance of the aggregated social content is not important, as the virtual community can only exist if relationships are considered meaningful. In other words, the virtual world only exists if its participants so desire it, and this gives it a special, spatial status.
To this end, the idea that virtual worlds are less valuable or simpler than physical worlds is rejected in favour of the claim that life in virtual worlds has become inextricable from life offline. To this end, the separation of virtual and physical worlds is becoming increasingly meaningless, as we begin to live in pervasive, mobile worlds. To this end, discussions about the ‘realness’ of virtual worlds have also become increasingly redundant. Instead, attention became focused on regulation and authentication, which remains a pressing concern within cyberspace. Anxieties about authentication become apparent in cases where virtual environments give rise to new controversies. For example, in 1999 the world was confronted with the commodification of human reproduction through the enterprise named ‘Ron’s Angels’ (see Miah & Rich, 2008). The initiative entailed the auctioning of male sperm and female ova, in an attempt to allow prospective parents to select the ideal genes for their children, rather than having to select the ideal partner. The web-based enterprise attracted a significant amount of attention from academic researchers and various fertility groups around the world condemned the practice. Yet, it slowly transpired that Ron Harris, the man behind the website was involved with the pornographic film industry and that many – if not all – of the donors were participants within these films. This brought into question the legitimacy of the egg and sperm auctioning organization, but not before the world’s media had reported on the website. Over the last 10 years, various measures of authentication have emerged, from the reputation based peer review of such sites as eBay, where individual buyers and sellers would make a public note of their experience of another user, to the Wikipedia style of debating contested entries.
One of the overarching concerns about virtual world studies is the tendency of media and politicians to make overly generalized claims about their social impact. There are many different cultures of virtual world experiences, which make for a diverse digital population and range of experiences. Often, the differences between these experiences are not acknowledged by media reporting on their character, which – since its inception – have focused on the detrimental consequences of life in virtual worlds. Yet, examples of virtual communities can be seen all around the Internet, from discussion boards on niche topics such as parenting, music, and television, to the teams on online gaming platforms such as World of Warcraft, formed in order to complete challenges and improve the computer game-play experience. The demographic characteristics of these populations have also changed progressively, from a culture dominated by young males, to an inter-generational population, with an increasingly similar gender split. Even within specific categories of virtual world experiences, populations differ. For example, within computer game culture, the World of Warcraft online gamer, who collaborate with other game players around the world to carry out quests is considerably different from the Dance Dance Revolution game population, a game that involves trying to act out physical dance steps in time with music.
The Future of Virtual Worlds
The development of virtual worlds involves both technological and social processes. Thus, without user competence maturation, technological progress is unlikely to occur. This simple observation – that people surpass technology – draws attention to a more complex proposition that what distinguishes virtual worlds is their amplification of sociability. Thus, virtual worlds must be seen as a parameter of social interaction in physical worlds and the task of developing virtual realities is of creating seamless experiences, where the most effective virtual experiences are those that most closely approximate the level of intimacy that can be achieve among people in physical worlds. Yet, the story of virtual worlds is not wholly of technological progress, or even user demands for better, more dynamic experiences. Rather, there is a considerable amount of nostalgia that now forms part of virtual world experiences. Generations of people that grew up playing computer games now seek to relive these periods, in the same way that they may watch old films or re-read books. Consequently, although the technology of virtual worlds is improving and, as a result, is offering new and alternative ways for us to connect online, the existing platforms do not always vanish with their predecessors. Instead, they appeal to the similar goals of promoting interaction between users and online identity representation.
Prominent examples of virtual worlds include Second Life, a self-defined virtual world, harbouring over 18 million registered accounts, and text-based chat, experimental or otherwise, still happens more than ever (although now it is possible to add multimedia elements to the discussion through audio and video conferencing software, such as Skype and MSN Live Messenger). For example, Second Life also provides further evidence of the cyclical nature of virtual world development. In 2007, reports arose about the rape of a character within Second Life, mimicking the story from one decade earlier when a text-based rape took place in the online chat-based game LambdaMOO (Mackinnon 1997).
Looking ahead, the concept of Web 2.0 has used to characterize the Internet’s second form – putting paid to all previous attempts to distinguish Internet eras. Web 2.0 is characterized by open source culture where users can build their own software and the rise of social networking media – or social media. With the advent of improved mobile technology, from wireless internet (wifi), “smart” mobile phones with stronger phone signals which carry data (3G) and small laptops (netbooks), the ways in which people are interacting with the Internet is shifting once again. Tools such as global positioning systems (GPS), which allow the user to add the details of their location while they share information, opens up possibilities for locative media to emerge. Furthermore, the ease in which people can participate in multimedia dialogue using mobile devices, allows for networks of communities to continuously engage with the virtual worlds in which they inhabit, without being bound to the restraints of a desktop computer terminal.
The close links between geography focused communication tools and the increased application of the digital world onto the physical one has lead to the creation of devices that can layer and recognise information relevant to both. An example of this is augmented reality (AR), a device which utilizes a mobile phone’s camera to reveal details about the world. Thus, when AR is enabled on a mobile device, the user can point their phone’s camera at a place in the physical world and be shown layers of information that are relevant to that location. For example, if a tourist is visiting the Eiffel Tower in Paris, she could point her mobile phone at the tower and, on the screen of the phone, would appear information about the Tower’s history and so on. This relatively new technology uses mapping software, which the phone has associated with its geographical position (via GPS) to provide real-time guides to real-world places. The range of uses to which this may be put are just beginning to emerge, but range from providing information about local amenities, travel information, or to other people, who are using similar services. Social media platforms such as Twitter and photo sharing website, Flickr, are already adding GPS details (metadata) to the content that people create, so that AR can be used across a range of populated locations. From this, the growing virtual world concept is already beginning to show clear possibilities of being able to link between the digital world and the physical world.
Conclusion
In conclusion, human presence in virtual worlds can take a variety of forms. Shields (1996) notes that our focus should not be on the literal interpretation of the user's avatar, but instead be the movement of information present within the virtual space. Described as “the flow”, the notion of virtuality begins in the body of one person and is mediated through the others who witness the dialogue placed into their presence. Consequently, the final environment is constructed through multiple strains of interlocking conversations, where all users control the final collective product. With this in mind, social networking websites such as Facebook and Twitter, although not immediately recognisable as traditionally defined virtual worlds, possess characteristics which suggest that the users are engaging with the environment much in this way. The technology is constituted by an online environment, which exist for users to connect and converse with their social network, while also contributing to a digital representation of themselves. These circumstances describe what Castells describes as a ‘network society’, where “you are what you say you are.”
References
Cameron, J. Avatar. 2009.
Gibson, W. Neuromancer. New York: Ace, 1984.
Haraway, D. "A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, & Socialist Feminism in the 1980s." Socialist Review 80 (1985): 65-108.
Kelly, K. Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines. London: Fourth Estate, 1994.
Leonard, B. The Lawnmower Man: Ben Jade Films Inc., 1992. Film.
MacKinnon, R. "Virtual Rape." Journal of Computer Mediated Communication 2, no. 4 (1997).
Mainzer, K. "Computer Technology and Evolution: From Artificial Intelligence to Artificial Life." In Techne: Society for Philosophy and Technology, 1998.
Miah, A., and Emma. Rich. The Medicalization of Cyberspace. Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2008.
Rojek, C. Decentring Leisure: Rethinking Leisure Theory. London: SAGE, 1995.
Shields, R., ed. Cultures of Internet: Virtual Spaces, Real Histories, Living Bodies. London: SAGE, 1996.
Turkle, S. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1995.
Wachowski, A, and L. Wachowski. The Matrix: Time Warner Entertainment Company, 1999.
Miah, A. (2011) New Media, in Bainbridge, W.S.J. (Ed) Leadership in Science and Technology. SAGE Reference, 264-271
" The proliferation of social media may bring into question the significance of the term new media. Yet, the concept of “the new media” requires addressing in such as way as to acknowledge the various forms in which innovation has occurred around media platforms generally and their cultural integration specifically. This involves taking into account the role of dominant media organizations, as well as considering prominent new organizations. Indeed, when trying to assess future directions in new media, these various elements are essential to take into account, so as to not naively embrace the cyber-libertarianism of the 1990s.
However, it also crucial to acknowledge, so as to understand the important ways in which new media artifacts have transformed society to various degrees, a great deal remains uncertain about new media culture For instance, if one were to characterize an ideal online population, then there are some limiting factors that one must acknowledge. For instance, consider Robin Dunbar’s (1992) claim that people can, at best, maintain meaningful human relations with perhaps no more than 150 people, beyond which it becomes harder to claim that the relationship has any significance in the person’s life. Dunbar’s claim is simply that people do not have enough neurons in the brain or hours in the day to dedicate to many more people. Thus, within platforms like Facebook, where some users build so-called “friend” connections with over 5,000 people, Dunbar’s number would question the legitimacy of the concept of “friend” here.
Equally, there may be an ideal ratio of consumer to producer of content that must be acknowledged, in order to optimize the functionality of communities. For instance, if all Twitter users produced vast amounts of tweets each day, there may be limited capacity for any single user to digest this information or to utilize it in any meaningful way. To this end, it is necessary to identify the different roles of an online population, but also to continually scrutinize the way that information is made sense of by user groups. To assist here, we may employ language from gaming environments. Crucially, this recognition disrupts the concept of leadership considerably, since it is no longer the role of one individual to take initiative. Consider the #cablegate example, which relies heavily on numerous individuals sharing information to permit people to follow what was taking place online. In short, within a platform like Twitter, the person who re-tweets content, may be as much of a leader as the originator of a tweet. Indeed, these two people may be leaders in different sectors completely.
Yet, the development of new media ought not be seen as simply a matter of technical innovation. Rather, there is an important cultural shift that must take place, in order for new media to have meaning for people. This shift entails having access to technology and thus, bridging the digital divide. However, as this gap closes, it then requires addressing the digital literacy divide, which is unlikely to reduce with time. In fact, it may continue to expand, as the pace of change online increases and new platforms – along with knowledge about how to use established platforms in more sophisticated ways – grows.
In turn, leadership in this area requires investment into both aspects at a macro level – in terms of the development of the industry – but also at the micro level – in terms of personal contributions from individual leaders. Indeed, there is an intimate relationship between the two, as the process towards technical innovation requires immersion within the digital cultures of early adoption that permits incremental development. This simple observation – that one should build community rather than technology – draws attention to a more complex proposition that what distinguishes virtual worlds is their amplification of the social world.
Thus, virtual worlds must be seen as a parameter of social interaction in physical worlds and the task of developing virtual realities is of creating seamless experiences, where the most effective virtual experiences are those that most closely approximate the level of intimacy that can be achieve among people in physical worlds. Thus, the story of new media is not wholly of technological progress, or even user demands for better, more dynamic experiences. Rather, there is a considerable amount of nostalgia that now forms part of virtual world experiences. Generations of people that grew up playing computer games now seek to relive these periods, in the same way that they may watch old films or re-read books. Consequently, although the technology of virtual worlds is improving and, as a result, is offering new and alternative ways for us to connect online, the existing platforms do not always vanish with their predecessors. Instead, they appeal to the similar goals of promoting interaction between users and online identity representation.
Looking ahead, Mainzer’s second computer age was drawing to a close, as discussions about Web 3.0 and the semantic web grew. With the advent of improved mobile technology, from wireless internet (wifi), “smart” mobile phones with stronger phone signals which carry data (3G) and small laptops (netbooks), the ways in which people are interacting with the Internet shifted once again. Tools such as global positioning systems (GPS), which allow the user to add the details of their location while they share information, open up possibilities for locative media to emerge. Furthermore, the ease in which people can participate in multimedia dialogue using mobile devices, allows for networks of communities to continuously engage with the virtual worlds in which they inhabit, without being bound to the restraints of a desktop computer terminal.
The close links between geography focused communication tools – locative technology - and the increased imposition of the digital world onto the physical one, has lead to the creation of devices that create layers of information and a seamless correspondence between the offline and online world. At the forefront of this development is augmented reality (AR), a protocol that utilizes a mobile phone’s camera lens to display details about the world. When AR is enabled on a mobile device, the user can point their phone’s camera at a place in the physical world and be shown layers of information that are relevant to that location. For example, if a tourist is visiting the Eiffel Tower in Paris, she could point her mobile phone at the tower and, on the screen of the phone, would appear information about the Tower’s history and so on. This relatively new technology uses mapping software, which the phone has associated with its geographical position (via GPS) to provide real-time guides to real-world places. The range of uses to which this may be put are just beginning to emerge, but range from providing information about local amenities, travel information, or to other people, who are using similar services. Social media platforms such as Twitter and photo sharing website, Flickr, added GPS details (metadata) to the content that people create, so that AR could “mash-up” data for use across a range of populated locations.
Additionally, there is still a long way to go before the convergence of digital systems that was discussed in the 1990s is complete. While we may certainly recognize that media organizations are much more aligned, there is still scope for development across different sectors. In November 2010, founder of the World Wide Web Tim Berners-Lee told journalist Charles Arthus of The Guardian that the future of journalism is in analyzing data. Yet, the device through which this process engages user may require much more creative work. One version of future leadership in journalism may involve news media organizations becoming architects of sophisticated data gathering games, reliant heavily on the contributions of citizen journalists who will develop their own sense of ownership of and engagement with the story through their active participation in its development.
Equally, there remains an ever-expanding lack of knowledge about user experiences of the same platform, or, indeed how use evolves over time. For example, Twitter had a range of software, which assists users in filtering and displaying information, such as Tweetdeck. This software permits users to embed images – thus no longer requiring a user to move from Tweetdeck to another platform, such as Flickr, or YouTube. For all intents and purposes, this removes the role of the Web browser completely and, perhaps signals the end of the World Wide Web as an interface. These elements all point to the need for further knowledge about new media experiences, both to understand how use may change over time, but also to come to terms with which forms of leadership will be most fruitful to adopt.
Adi, A. & Miah, A. (2011) Yahoo!, in Barnett, G. Encyclopedia of Social Networks, SAGE.
Yahoo! Inc. is a global Internet communications, commerce and media company with headquarters in Sunnyvale, California (USA) and offices in Europe, Asia, Latin America, Australia, Canada and the United States. The services offered by Yahoo! Inc. include Corporate Yahoo!, a popular customized enterprise portal solution; audio and video streaming; store hosting and management; and Web site tools and services. According to Alexa, the web information company owned by Amazon.com, Yahoo.com is the fourth most visited website worldwide and the third most visited in the United States. In Comscore’s results, a company specialized in digital measurement and digital marketing intelligence, Yahoo!’s search engine is the second most used in the US.
From hobby to leading multi-service provider: 1994 – 1999
Yahoo! was founded in founded in January 1994 by Stanford Ph.D. students David Filo and Jerry Yang. Started as a hobby hosted on the university servers, Yahoo got its name as an acronym for Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels brute yahoos. The site was initially entitled “Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web".
A year after its launch, Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape Communications, invited the founders of Yahoo! to move Yahoo! to the larger computer system housed at Netscape. The domain yahoo.com was registered that year with the company going incorporated shortly afterwards. 1995 is also marked by negotiations between Yahoo! and venture capitalists. Sequoia Capital, known among others for its investments in Apple Computer, Atari, Oracle and Cisco Systems offered Yahoo! in April 1995 an initial investment of nearly $2 million.
At the time, a very innovative dimension of Yahoo! was its marketing model. The majority of Yahoo!’s revenue came through banner advertising deals. This involved selling space on Yahoo!’s own web pages to companies that wished to promote their products to Yahoo!’s users. The advert usually involved an image with an embedded link to the advertising company’s website. For 1995, when the main advertising outlets were still represented by print and broadcast media, putting the consumer in direct contact with the company advertised was a groundbreaking.
Yahoo! also generated revenue from partnerships and distribution deals with websites aiming to increase their own number of users, also referred to as traffic. In order to drive and increase traffic of other websites, Yahoo! led its customer traffic to the partner websites in exchange for a cut of the transaction revenues whenever users made purchases. This is what turned Yahoo! from a search engine, its first service, into a web-portal, a gate-way to the rest of the Internet.
These two revenue-generating strategies, allowed Yahoo! to continue expanding its services, strategic acquisitions of other companies whose services were complimentary to Yahoo!’s offer being one way of achieving that. Additionally, having secured revenue from advertising seeking companies, Yahoo! could offer its user oriented services for free unlike competitors America Online (AOL) or Microsoft Network.
In time, this enabled Yahoo to explore user customizable features and electronic communities. In March 1997, Yahoo! bought communications company Four11, transforming its emailing RocketMail product into Yahoo! Mail. That same year, Yahoo! launched My Yahoo!, a service that allowed users to personalize their Yahoo! page to meet their interests. Other acquisitions such as that of ClassicGames.com and direct marketing company Yoyodyne Entertainment in 1998, had Yahoo! launch its own gaming site, Yahoo!Games and messenger application, Yahoo! Pager later renamed Yahoo! Messenger. In 1998, Yahoo! also entered a partnership with communications giant AT&T to provide Internet access through AT&T's WorldNet service in 1998. Yahoo! continued with the purchase of Geocities in January 1999, a creator of electronic communities that enabled users to set up their own personal home pages. The service would be closed in 2009.
Customer tailored options and services focused on user satisfaction and enhanced user interaction strengthened Yahoo!’s position and helped increase its user base. This enabled the company further to explore user empowering, experience enhancing and network growing services. It could be said that, in this sense, Yahoo!’s end 90’s acquisitions prepare the company to transition from web 1.0 to web 2.0 and make it a path opener of both social media and social networking. To reflect its expansion Yahoo!’s upgraded and changed their terms of service after every acquisition made.
Getting ready for web 2.0: 2000 – present
In the early years of 2000, Yahoo! concentrated on closing partnerships with telecommunications and Internet providers. Also, in June 2000 Google became Yahoo’s default search engine promising thus increased accuracy and rapid return of high-quality results. The deal lasted until 2004 when Yahoo! returned to use its own technology, taking thus advantage of its latest search engines acquisitions, AltaVista and AlltheWeb, the subsidiaries of Overture Services, Inc. being among them.
In 2005, as a result of joint efforts of Yahoo! and Microsoft the messenger services of the two companies, Yahoo! Messenger and MSN Messenger, became interoperable allowing users of both service to add people to their lists registered with the other service. This enabled the two competing services to maintain their user base and increase user satisfaction.
During 2005-2006 Yahoo! made a series of tactical moves and acquisitions marking its transitions to web 2.0 specialized services. It rebrands its music service to Yahoo! Music, purchased photo sharing service Flickr, blo.gs, a Real Simple Syndication (RSS) aggregation service, social bookmarking service del.icio.us, and social event calendar upcoming.org and playlist sharing community Webjay. The company also launches its own social networking service Yahoo! 360° taking advantage of all the sharing features it recently acquired. The service was abandoned in 2008 in favor of experimenting with a universal profile. In 2007, Yahoo! offered unlimited storage to its users. Finally, in July 2009 Yahoo! announced a 10-year deal with Microsoft . The deal encompassed allowing Microsoft full access and permission to use Yahoo!’s search engine in future projects for Microsoft’s own search engine, Bing.
During its almost two decades of existence Yahoo! has achieved a tremendous growth and incredible expansion as an online social networking environment. The company's most notable contributions to the online business environment are perhaps its prototype search engine, its revenue-making model and its experimentation with adjacent services that supported its core business and hence helped generate more revenue.
However, Yahoo!’s most effective contributions towards social networking remain its widely used Yahoo! Groups, which provides a free email group service and Flickr, which provides video and still photography sharing tools. Respectively, these services mark the two eras of the Internet that Yahoo! has straddled – Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. While Yahoo! Groups still thrives, the prolific success of Flickr, which reached its 5 billionth photograph shared on 5 September 2010 – reveals how much Yahoo! contributes to the promotion of social networking via the sharing of creative media
Miah, A. (2011) Bioethical Concerns in a Culture of Human Enhancement. In Bouchard, C. & Hoffman, E. Encyclopedia of Sports Medicine, Genetic and Molecular Aspects of Sport Performance. Lausanne, International Olympic Committee, 383-392.
"The ethics of performance enhancement in sport are operationalized through WADA as a principle of “strict liability”, which deems that any positive anti-doping test means immediate suspension pending an inquiry. Yet, there are many biotechnological modifications that the sports world does not address, such as functional elective surgery. To this extent, questions remain about how genetic and molecular modifications or knowledge should be treated in the long term. Arguably, as humanity’s continued pursuit of health progresses, it will become apparent that the use of such science implies seeking to alter those biological processes that are a part of the aging process, and our intervention ultimately will ensure a collapse of the distinction between therapy and enhancement. If societies accept such continued pursuit, then the attempts to maintain sport as an environment free from enhancement will not simply be impractical or undesirable, they would also contravene fundamental human rights. To this end, as the sports world races ahead to criminalize doping practices and treat the widespread use of performance enhancement as a broad public health issue, it will need to consider the interface between the local, national and international policy debates. Arguably, the political history of sport in the post-war period ensured that genetic science would be treated as a questionable technology for sports, where gene doping would become an integral part of the war on drugs. Yet, as the American Academy of Pediatrics (2005) noted, young people are not using steroids just for competitive sport. Rather, there is a broad culture of enhancement that underpins the use of technology. In time, genetic modification may become a part of this culture, though its integration within society will emerge first through applications that are medically justified and sports have yet to resolve how they will address the genetically modified athlete that society deems to be medically permissible"
Adi, A. & Miah, A. (2011) Open Source Protest: Rights, Online Activism, and the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games, in Cottle, S. & Lester, L. Transnational Protests and the Media. Peter Lang,213-224.
"In a global, digitally mediated world, there are various dimensions of contemporary protest culture that require our reconsideration. First, the expansion of communication technology permits local concerns to reach a global audience with considerable immediacy who, in turn, may also actively shape their reception. A good example of this is the British celebrity Stephen Fry’s re-tweeting of content related to the Iran election concerns of 2009 (McElroy, 2009). In this case, a celebrity’s sharing of content and active interpretation of what was taking place thus becomes a primary frame around the issue at hand. This is a clear example of a celebratory acting both as an activist, cultural intermediary, and journalist. An open media culture requires that some control over one’s ‘brand’ or agenda is devolved, thus permitting the community to own and shape its development. This transition presupposes a shared value system, against which people may act and, while it is not difficult to imagine there is common ground in some cases, such as the world economy or climate change, it will require considerable work to ensure that local concerns have the kind of relevance for a global audience that would lead to greater support, rather than audience apathy. This may require local communities to compromise on their issues for a wider audience in order to optimize the profile of their concerns. For example, a community protests about local housing policy injustice may seek an alliance with other such communities in other parts of the world.
Second, the rise of transnational concerns means that protests against the institutions that do business across borders will find themselves under greater scrutiny by even greater advocacy groups. Thus, the growing monopolization of global companies creates a series of tensions for both politicians and user communities. Such challenges were reflected in the 2010 dispute between China and Google over uncensored search engines, which demonstrated that such a universally shared view about media freedom and access to information is not yet apparent. The debacle gave rise to considerable acts of protest over China’s Internet laws. More familiar examples of transnational protests have arisen in the context of fair-trade or ethical trade products, or concerns about the child labour. In the context of the Olympics, this has particular relevance, since its financial base is supported by some of the world’s biggest brands, such as McDonald’s, Visa, Lenovo, Coca-Cola, etc. From one perspective, the Olympic Games could function as a device to make such companies more publicly accountable – for example by adhering to the IOC’s environmental policies - and so one may argue that the Olympics is an arbiter of activist concerns. Yet, the broader social concerns about how such companies may benefit from a mega-event that many members of the public believe should be free from corporate interests, deems that this mechanism of building greater corporate responsibility may not always be a primary value for the general public. Finally, a global, digital era requires us to interrogate what counts as activism or protest. While we strongly advocate the idea that even the most minimal gesture online should qualify – such as sharing a website address via the social networking platform Twitter, which may require little more than two clicks of a mouse button – it will be necessary to consider strategically how different forms of activism lead to different results. Clearly, what arises from a Web 2.0 era of user-generated content is the capacity to build impact from the ground up. This is why a powerful web community can out perform a large transnational company in such terms as Google rankings and general visibility, as is typified by viral marketing campaigns. Yet, it remains to be seen whether digital activism – or hacktivism – can generate a significant impact without receiving attention from traditional media. Of course, as a campaign escalates, there comes a point where the traditional media become an integral part of the cycle of news syndication, so these are incredibly difficult phenomena to analyze in isolation. Nevertheless, further research may study the interaction of traditional and online journalism to better gauge how convergence - a term that was applied to media systems in the 1990s - has reached the level of protest culture. In the Olympics, we suggest that this is already apparent."
Watching the news tonight with Pres Mubarak's speech takes me back 3 years. We went first to Cairo, then took the night train to Aswan. From there, flew to Abu Simbel, then train back up to Luxor, finally arriving into Cairo again with just enough time for a day trip to Alexandria. Tough schedule, but such a glimpse into a remarkable country.
It has been about 18 months since I last visited Olympic Park and a lot has changed. As part of a conference organized by Birkbeck, we had a great Olympic park walk around the perimeter, including a stunning view from an Jim Woodall's art work 'Olympic State' gallery space on the north east side.
Ai Weiwei's Sunflower Seeds currently at TATE Modern. Here is some text from TATE:
Juliet Bingham, Curator, Tate Modern
"Ai Weiwei's Unilever Series commission, Sunflower Seeds, is a beautiful, poignant and thought-provoking sculpture. The thinking behind the work lies in far more than just the idea of walking on it. The precious nature of the material, the effort of production and the narrative and personal content create a powerful commentary on the human condition. Sunflower Seeds is a vast sculpture that visitors can contemplate at close range on Level 1 or look upon from the Turbine Hall bridge above. Each piece is a part of the whole, a commentary on the relationship between the individual and the masses. The work continues to pose challenging questions: What does it mean to be an individual in today's society? Are we insignificant or powerless unless we act together? What do our increasing desires, materialism and number mean for society, the environment and the future?"
It is well known that the installation originally permitted people to walk around these porcelin seeds, but that due to the health risk posed by the dust, this came to an end rapidly. I'm sure it would have been beautiful to walk amidst them, but the fact that seeds were taken from the installation seemed to add an additional layer of complexity to the work.
To the extent that the art work is a motif for the West's reliance on the East's low-cost industrial labour force, the pillaging of seeds by Westerners reinforces the notion that this is an exploitative relationship. Yet, given the pride taken by the village's people in the crafting of ceramics, this unavoidable inequality still has integrity, meaning and value for a community that otherwise would have no source of income, as was true of this particular village, whose ceramic work was reaching its end.
Photographs from the event 'London 2012: the First Transhuman Games?'
How should we regard the business card in a digital age, both in terms of its future, but also in terms of what their function may be as historical artefacts? For a few years now, I have been photographing business cards that I have received and I decided today that they should go into the public domain.
Of course, one of the initial issues raised by this is ethical. Were they intended to be distributed in the public sphere? Indeed, are they public or private artefacts? Does our response to this question change over time?
There is also aesthetic value in displaying business cards in this way and this may have a bearing on how we regard the ethical issue. However, I want to stick with the ethics first. Did the people who gave me their cards imagine they would enter into the public domain? I doubt it. Would they mind? Perhaps. Is it unethical that I am doing this? Perhaps. Yet, when I received the card, there was no clarification over what I may do with it. We did not discuss this.
Neither have i been taught to treat business cards as private transactions. Indeed, I would be delighted for my own business cards to enter the public domain in this way or, at least, I would be indifferent. By uploading them to flickr, I am, in fact, undertaking a public service whereby I have created a website for people who may otherwise have no chance of reaching out in this way.
Certainly, the receipt of some business cards feels more vaulable than others. Some cards may seem more exclusive and privileged to have. Others are ten a penny and people are just desperate to give them to you, nobody what.
On balance, I conclude that the good that may arise from my having published them in this manner far out weighs the possible violation of privacy that may ensue for some of the people who, foolishly, wish for their details to be made available only to the random recipient they happened to meet at some chance encounter. Indeed, one may argue that some business cards have personal details, such as mobile phone numbers, which reinforce the claim that they ought be kept private, to which my reply is 'hogwash'. If you dont want to be contacted on a personal number, don't put it on the card.
As well, by putting them online, I avoid losing them, which was a primary reason for photographing them in the first place.
Equally, there is a temporal element to this matter. Most of the cards here will have details that are now out of date, so the privacy issue is even less of a concern. To this end, they are historic records of people's affiliations and perhaps valuable for that reason alone. Some of them include hand writing, which gives them additional value.
I also think if valuable to reflect on the value of a business card in the context of such platforms as LinkedIn and the general shift towards greater connectivity. Arguably, each individual decided their level of exposure and there may be some who deliberately choose the level of exposure to be that enabled by a business card and not the expanded kind offered by social media sites such as Linked In.
On this basis, that desire ought to be respected and I may have violated that expectation. Yet, again, I revert back to my earlier observation that, for business cards, this has never been clarified, at least not to me. As such, given the other positive reasons for making them public, I will err on this side, rather than imagine there to be an ethical issue that does not yet exist.
I am also concerned about what happens to the business card over time. Looking through my list of cards, I realize most of these people I never contacted again or, certainly, never sought their details by referring back to the card. Perhaps I am unusual here, but I doubt it. In any case, this is the new business card, isn't it?
I will let you know if anyone complains about their card being online, but I would not hold you breath, if I were you.
On 24th January, 2011, at 630pm @UWScreative will be hosting an 'inspired by London 2012' event at the CCA in Glasgow, host city for ICSEMIS 2012.
TOO BOOK YOUR PLACE, CLICK HERE
The event is FREE to attend and open to all. It will bring together a scientist, an artist and a philosopher (me) in conversation about the way in which athletes bodies and minds are being transformed by technology.
Today, elite sports find themselves in increasingly unchartered waters. More than ever before, athletes are using technology to optimize their biology for performance and many of their methods are not even tested for by the authorities. From genetic tests for sport performance to the use of superhuman prosthetic enhancements, this subject reaches parts that present-day anti-doping rules cannot reach. These technologies have changed elite sports, as we know them, but the next decade promises even more of an overhaul to what we think being good at sport means. As we approach the London 2012 Games, this debate will consider the ethical implications of new technology in sport, asking what distinguishes the cheat from the innovator. We will ask whether the debate about the ethics of athletic performance is all but over, as the winners' podium makes space for the transhuman athlete.
Going beyond the familiar debate about doping and anti-doping, this debate will consider how far biology has been pushed by technical systems and what Jacques Ellul called the technological society. It will include Dr Yannis Pitsiladis, who works with the World Anti-Doping Agency on genetic technologies and live artist Francesca Steele (pictured here in an image by Simon Keitch www.simonkeitch.com), who became a body builder as part of her most recent performance work. Along with me, we will consider how we ought to regard the future of sport and how it will function in an era of transhuman enhancements.
The event is presented by the University of the West of Scotland as part of 'Knowing Sport: The science behind the medals', a public engagement initiative of ICSEMIS 2012 (Glasgow) supported by PODIUM and Research Councils UK, Inspired by London 2012'.
Speaker Biographies
Dr Yannis Pitsiladis is a Reader in Exercise Physiology at the Institute of Cardiovascular & Medical Sciences in the College of Medicine, Veterinary & Life Sciences at the University of Glasgow and founding member of the “International Centre for East African Running Science” (ICEARS) set up to investigate the determinants of the phenomenal success of east African distance runners in international athletics. Recent projects also include the study of elite sprinters from Jamaica and the USA and the study of world class swimmers (e.g., why are there very few black swimmers?). He is a Visiting Professor in Medical Physiology at Moi University (Eldoret, Kenya) and Addis Ababa University (Addis Ababa, Ethiopia). He is a member of the Scientific Commission of the International Sports Medicine Federation (FIMS, and a member of the List Committee of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA). He is also a Fellow of the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM).
Francesca Steele has performed and exhibited work nationally and internationally since graduating with a BA in Fine Art from Northumbria University. She was awarded the Belsay Hall Fellowship in 2006, and has spent time as an artist in residence in various sensitive research, medical and rehabilitation settings including The Centre for Life and PEALS, in Newcastle and Horticultural Healing (a rehabilitation project for clients with acquired brain injury) in Plymouth. Francesca has performed at Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead and Arnolfini, Bristol amongst other UK and international venues. Her work has been featured in a range of publications, most recently Marina Abramovic and the Future of Performance Art (Prestel 2010). Currently Francesca bodybuilds specifically as part of her arts practice. The preparation for her current work began in October of 2008, since that time Francesca has trained as a bodybuilder. She won the title of Miss Plymouth in September 2009 and Miss West Britain (Trained Figure) at the National Amateur Body Building Association (NABBA) competition in April 2010, in May of that year she placed in the top six at the British Finals. From these experiences she has continued to develop her arts practice, through video and live performance work. Notably Routine, which was performed at The Pigs of Today are the Hams of Tomorrow (January 2010) and then the National Review of Live Art in Glasgow (March 2010).
and here's my sport biography :)
Professor Andy Miah, PhD, is Chair of Ethics and Emerging Technologies in the Faculty of Business & Creative Industries at the University of the West of Scotland, Global Director for the Centre for Policy and Emerging Technologies, Fellow of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, USA and Fellow at FACT, the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology, UK. He is co-editor of Sport Technology: History, Philosophy and Policy (2002), currently on sale in the IOC Museum. He is author of over 50 papers on technology and sport and is author of ‘Genetically Modified Athletes’ (2004 Routledge), the first book to address this new science of human enhancement. He often gives pro-enhancement arguments, the most enjoyable of which was giving one such address to the IOC President Jacques Rogge and the Queen of Sweden at the Nobel institute in Sweden.
I spent the New Year in Norwich with family, after Christmas in Barcelona. Ethan (shown here underwater in all his glory) will turn 1 year old in 5 months and he is the focus of my new year's reflection.
Ethan was born at home in a birthing pool after a reasonably rapid overnight labour. I had the pleasure of lifting him out of the water for his first breath and, of course, cut the umbilical cord. The midwife recorded his time of birth at 5:22am, at the very moment when dawn broke in Liverpool that day. Everything went very well throughout the delivery; the midwife even said it was the d the best she had ever attended in her 15 year career.
Beatriz was in such a good place physically and mentally by that day; relaxed, in control and doing it the way she wanted. The pool was phenomenal - an incredibly rigid inflatable structure, providing crucial support, lots of space, and soft cushioning. It was also the only pain relief she required, except for 2 paracetamol which she took only because the midwife suggested it. Needless to say, Beatriz is now a massive advocate of both having a water birth and home birth, though we are conscious of the fact that we live just 200 metres from the hospital and this influenced our perception of risk.
Yet, the risks associated with home birth are really poorly articulated in the UK. Just this week, the Head of the Royal College of Midwives commented on the slight decrease in homebirths from 2009 to 2010, explaining that this is an indication of the deep seated medicalized view of birth that exists within the UK. Medicalization is a subject I've given considerable thought. The UK is not exceptional in this regard, though its home birth rates are well below many other countries.
Our own experience of the NHS in this regard was probably about average. The Liverpool Women's Hospital had recently appointed a Senior Midwife Consultant to improve the home birth rates around Merseyside and we had a conversation with him, after trying to find out whether they could undertake cord blood harvesting at the delivery. The umbilical cord is rich with stem cells, which can be used to protect the child against blood related disorders, such as leukemia. It may even be used by other members of the family, such as a future sibling with a health problem. For this reason, the incentive to store cord blood is strong, especially considering that the cost is perhaps only as much as a family holiday.
In any case, saving cord blood was something I had thought about a great deal and have often spoken about in lectures about the ethics of stem cell research. I often introduce the subject by describing a real life experience I had walking into Borders books in Glasgow and seeing a magazine on one of the shelves with the front page headline: 'Have you saved your baby's stem cells?' These moments when technology becomes a moral imposition for everyday people are often the focus of my work. Beatriz and I wanted to save them and were even willing to pay the £2,000 to undertake the procedure and storage - but found that there were various obstacles to our achieving this.
First, while the procedure of harvesting is reasonably simple, the Human Tissue Authority - along with the blood storage facilities where the blood would be located - requires that a licensed person undertakes the procedure.
Second, the NHS is unable to support the process; its midwives are neither trained nor licensed to undertake the procedure. While a couple of the midwives we spoke to during the pregnancy said it would be fine, when we investigated further to obtain an official confirmation, it became quickly apparent that the NHS could not provide this facility at all, whether or not we were having Ethan in a hospital or at home. As such, the only route would have been to have contracted a licensed person who we would most likely have to pay to come to Liverpool and stay the night or so that would be necessary in order for them to be available to collect the blood at the opportune moment.
The implications of this for a home birth are particularly problematic, as one of the main reasons for having a homebirth is to avoid the need for other people to be around. So, the idea of having someone hanging around our living room while Beatriz was in labour, did not really appeal. Of course, we would also be paying that person an hourly fee of some significance, while they were waiting.
Third, we discovered that the collection of cord blood is actually not completely compatible with a natural delivery. Specifically, once the delivery has occurred, there is a moment when the blood from the cord passes into the baby and it is generally thought to be a good thing., Collecting cord blood would involve cutting the cord before the final amount of blood has passed through it into the baby. Thus, cutting and storing would deny the baby this amount of blood. It is unclear to me whether this implies a significant health risk, though some evidence does say that this could significantly increase health risks for the new born child. One NHS website indicates that it ought not interfere with anything that would imply a risk, but this level of detail certainly did not translate to our situation in Liverpool, where it felt we may have been the first at our hospital to have inquired into this. Moreover, it is difficult to decide how one compares this risk with the risk of the child contracting an illness that may require cord blood. However, the more certain health risk of the child being deprived of necessary blood seemed more significant to us.
In the end, this totality of obstacles led us to decide that collecting cord blood would not be desirable. One other matter I have not yet mentioned was the NHS claim that the distraction of collecting cord blood could interfere with the delivery itself and this may be an additional risk.
All of this debate was significant for us, but it is light years away from what I had intended to write about on this new year's day. Other things I wanted to mention were the mobile phone apps we'd used during the pregnancy, delivery and first months of Ethan's life. They helped a great deal just to keep track of his development. The most useful were a contraction timer and an app that allowed you to monitor sleep, nappy changes, and feeds. Each were very helpful and we're now using a growth chart app. We also bought a Lindam video monitor, which has been an amazing way to provide a sense of freedom, togetherness and an opportunity to learn his patterns without having to run upstairs every time he cries. Its musical function has also worked numerous times to settle him when else we might have been tempted to use a passifier.
Ethan has done very well from the start. We followed the Gina Ford routines quite carefully, especially in the first 6 months. He has never slept a full night with us and has been happy in his own room from day 2. From the end of the first month, he was even sleeping through the night - and not just the 5 hours that is the official definition of sleeping through the night - but from 7pm to 7am. As such, we've had nearly no sleepless nights and he's always eaten very well.
Fortunately, we've not yet had reason to regret our decision to protect the moment of delivery, in exchange for not guarding against a potential health problem Ethan may encounter and hopefully, we will not have any future cause to regret it. However, I cannot help but feel that this simple practice needs some radical rethinking both within the NHS and generally. There is nothing more frustrating than when a present-day technology fails to improve society, either because of unreasonable costs or incapable systems and presently, it seems that cord blood collection structures fail most people. Indeed, a considerable public resource is lost by the inadequacy of these services and this may be the biggest lossl.