Facts corrected. My impression of Professor Mann comes from (always-flawed) press coverage; glad to hear from human beings in person!
It’s very interesting to hear that the real cyborg experience is a community, which is different from the media and commercial stereotype.
My commentary about the cyborg is more about the popular image, and less about Professor Mann’s book, as he and his students are saying loud and clear!
I do think there’s a difference between common popular and commercial images of augmented reality that isolate the individual; and some emerging kinds of communication tools — including, it sounds like, Prof. Mann’s work.
I haven’t read the book yet, though it is certainly now on my list.
p.s. The book is out of print, but I just picked up a used copy at ABE Books, and there are more in stock at Half.com
Yes, I think there’s a tendency of the Popular Press to sell us a vision of the future that sells newspaper. It’s also interesting how they depict me as “walking around with”, but failing to mention that I invented, designed, built, and THEN wore (“walked around with”) a research prototype of my invention. Such trivialization combined with sensationalization has a destructive effect, that may, in part, explain things like the recent injury that ended my life as a cyborg, to which, in partnership with the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology we had a (de)conference to explore what comes next in an age of terrorizing (or at least marginalizing, trivializing, and sensationalizing) the cyborg. Part of DECONference (http://deconference.com) explored the final chapter in my book, CYBORG, by showing that we’re all cyborgs, and we only realize this after we’ve been “decyborged”.
Perhaps you can tell us what newspaper (or even post a copy of the original article). There’s a common tendency to sensationalize my inventions in order to make them seem as something different, simply because such sensationlization stands out, to sell more newspaper by making it appear as something different. But it’s really not all that different than other inventions like the telephone, or the television, or the printing press, that do actually create community — but just different kinds of community.
I’ll look up the articles this evening.
You may have written about this in your book; I have it from Claude Fisher’s Social History of the Telephone
– early telephone companies expected that the phone would be used as a business tool, and talked disparagingly about people who wasted time with idle chatter.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0520086473/qid=1043609566/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_1/104-9135645-9605545?v=glance&s=books&n=507846