Cortexting Neurotifications

            Remember that rad (yes, I still use this word) house party you went to last Friday? Remember the totally suave status update you posted while the cute girl you were chatting up went to the bathroom? And those pictures! Who knew you could embarrass yourself so much that a complete stranger would catch it on film and tag your drunken face on Facebook.

Now imagine these feelings, physical states, and emotions presented in ways text characters and words could never express. What if the capacity to capture the psycho-emotive-physiological state of an experience was as easy as uploading a packet of information for another to receive and re-experience?

            I find myself discussing brain-control interfaces (BCIs), EEGs, eye tracking, and similar technologies quite frequently. These technologies will unequivocally reshape our understanding and techniques of computing and data interaction over the course of the next decade. Much like in the film Strange Days, I expect a day in the not too distant future, where a “status” update will be a complex data packet capable of recreating emotion, physical sensation, and psychological state through some readily accessible and affordable hardware medium. Perhaps we should call these experiential neurobiological updates neurotifications or cortexting.

            Of course, this brings a whole host of tricky and problematic questions to the table. Privacy, security, and accessibility all linger like dark shadows in the corner booth at a smoky bar when the adytum of the soul is exposed for the world to see and dissect. The discussions regarding privacy and security on social network platforms like Facebook (e.g. persona/profile hijacking for affiliate advertising, facial-recognition and tagging automation scripts, “phantom” accounts for agitation, etc.) present a whole generation with ideas more foreign to the human mind than any generation preceding could have ever imagined. These concepts may not dominate our thoughts on a daily basis, but it is hard to deny they’ve sown deep seeds and may bring forth a new dynamic in the eons-old vacillation between knowledge of self and knowledge of other.

            I can recall many times, sitting there staring at the blank update box, wanting to say something that might stir the same overwhelming emotion or feeling that put me in a “loss of words” state in the first place. Driven by some sick hope that if I were able to select just the right words, just the right rhythm, the right moment, that little box could bare my essence to others so they might understand. More often than not, I find the words and ideas chosen to communicate those candid thoughts presented in a solipsistic manner. Quick as I was to share that feeling, I often wipe the slate clean and go back to some other distraction or sublimation of emotion.

            It strikes me that the possibility of tapping into the neural network of the human body to advance the trend begun by social networking will have many folks up in arms. Oddly enough, I find myself wont to embrace and apply such a technology. However off-kilter it may seem to the reader, a part of me perceives such a wild technology fostering the capacity to achieve the effect social networking ought originally have been designed for: to put us intimately in touch with one another; to increase cross-cultural and pan-global understanding and empathy; and to dissolve the geo-political borders which parochial, xenophobic governments have put in place to barricade us from embracing the next phase of human evolution.