What is a companion technology?

BUDDY BUTTONS and PLASTIC PALS:  ON COMPANION TECHNOLOGIES

An interview with Roman Onufrijchuk by Richard Smith

Roman is a colleague of mine at SFU and fellow member of CPROST. We worked at NewMIC together and at my request he has turned his philosophical and phenomenological mind to the problem of mobile rich media context-aware technologies. In his view the coming generations of mobile technologies ought to be thought of as "companion technologies."
I grabbed Roman for a minute the other day and asked him a few questions. These are his answers, between smokes and sips of a dark americano, in the sun outside Blenz.

I hope to bring you more of this stuff, as the debate between Roman and I expands and extends over the next few months.

What are companion technologies?

A simple metaphor could be "PC meets mobile phone and the Internet."  In the 80s, Nicholas Negroponte – one of the gurus of the "dotcom" episode – argued that we were witnessing the implosion of three sectors hitherto fore thought separate:  publishing, entertainment, and digital media.  These do come together in Companion Technologies.  

But [publishing, entertainment, and digital media] are not the only sectors intersecting in these emergent media.  To get something of the scope of the technological intervention and deputization involved, we need only consider that for CTs to do for us what their makers will soon promise, not only will they be digital wireless communication and data storage and retrieval machines, they will have to possess a degree of intelligence, personality, and autonomy.  Furthermore, not only will CTs be always on, but more importantly, they will also be always with [us].

Can you give us some definitions?

First of all, let's take mobile. Mobile means portable and personal.

Rich media means digital, audio, visual, always on and always connected to any number of services and data bases on line.

 

These seem unproblematic - although your definition of rich media seems a bit of an expansion from what I am used to - but what about "companion?" Is there an easy way to capture that concept?

Companion means that the technology is the product of continuing synthesis of current PDAs, smart phones, and web-based information, entertainment, personal time-, financial- and life-management, as well as being an archive for easy retrieval of photos, videos, documents, recordings of various kinds.  

That, it seems to me, is really just an expansion of rich media as you have defined it. Is there something more?

For such a technology to be a true companion technology, there are an additional set of requirements that would need fulfilling:

- Sophisticated voice recognition and language processing capabilities.

- A high personalization index enabling a wide range of diversity in configuration.

- Cumulative and inferential learning ability.

- An emotion engine (for reading and expressing emotional states) and an effective bonding simulator, both connecting to intra-relational and inter-network fail-safe security protocols.

- Distributed functions, storage and processing.

- Controllable, and fail-safe, degrees of autonomous function – processing information-only e-mails and various messages, prioritizing, scanning the mediascape for relevant information, making connections with other Companion Technologies to arrange meetings and beg-off visits, and so on.

- Enormous processing speed, storage capacity, battery life, climatic and impact durability, location and status self-monitoring and response (it tells you if it thinks you’re about to leave it where it fell on the theatre floor during a movie).  

- Completely unproblematic portability, transparent interface, and maximum recoverability/security.

Some of that seems reasonably likely or already present in existing smart phones. But a lot of that is still the stuff of movies and unobtainium. Are we likely to see all of these things anytime soon?

While this is true and could remain so into the near future, Frank Zingrone’s notion of "insistent technologies" coupled with soberly viewed external indicators suggests that Companion Technologies of one sort or another are in the human future, and not that far away.  

Weekly monitoring of the scientific inter pares and popular science presses shows that the requirements above are appearing less as impediments but more matters of time.  

What do you mean by "insistent technologies?" Is that a form of technological determinism?

Not really. Technological determinism suggests that there are characteristics within the technology itself that implies a type of inevitability. This is a little different. Zingrone's concept asks us to acknowledge that there have been deep, recurring and persistent dreams that have haunted and fuelled the drive to technological development – the dream of flight is one example.  

No less is a dream of an ideal, intelligent, sensitive companion, who is absolutely loyal, completely trustworthy, and cares for our well-being: valet, assistant, girl Friday, Guardian Angel, node to the cyberverse, and through Blue technology, a magic wand for garage doors, rice cookers and virtual presence.

In a sense, there's little that would really be novel here.  In non-interoperative, unsophisticated, crude, over-featurized and understudied form, much of this already exists.  The buddy-in-a-button being conjectured here, of course, might never come to be in the form described.   But to expect these discrete and non-interoperative technologies to stay that way forever is a prime example of what McLuhan characterized as driving forward with eyes rooted firmly on the rear-view mirror; perhaps not deeply enough into the passed, however, as McLuhan himself suggested.

Companion technologies will represent an amalgamation, a gestalt or synthesis, of a number of constituent technologies, which since their appearance in the 19th and 20th centuries have demonstrated a tendency to convergence.  As recent literature suggests, and McLuhan foresaw in the mid-20th century, new media tend to contain the qualities, content and adhere to the forms of older media until there has been sufficient time to explore the creative and relational limits and affordances proffered by the new contender.