Screens’r’us: From Bodies with Prostheses to Bodies as “Quasi-Prostheses”?

The ideology of “Transparency 2.0” has posited the advent of wearable technologies as a further step toward a transparent digital immediacy. Moreover, sometimes that very advent has been interpreted as a signal that screens would likely disappear in the near future. The authors think that, in the present phase of the digital era, the aforementioned technological externalization of human skills (Chaps. 2 and 3 ) intersects a reversed, yet not opposed, “internalization” of technology, which has been radicalized by wearable devices. However, in the authors’ opinion this dynamic does not imply any disappearing of screen functions in the near future. Rather, they think that wearable technologies increasingly tend to assign those same functions to the human body and especially to some of its organs, temporarily involving them as additional components of their connected digital artifacts. This is the case with eye tracking technologies using our eyes as screens, as well as with smart temporary tattoos “augmenting” our skin, understood as the primary interface relating our body to the environment. Such uses transform those bodily organs in what the authors call “quasi-prostheses”: this term, they think, clarifies the peculiarly ambiguous status that these organs come to assume. Indeed, on the one hand, they are actual bodily organs, and in this sense they are expected to keep an organic relation with the whole body, even during such processes. Yet, on the other hand, they are temporarily used and reshaped as components of connected digital apparatuses aiming at strengthening our potentialities, especially our bodily skills. Also, such bodily organs could clearly work as “quasi-prostheses” of those apparatuses’ main interfaces, namely as screens. In a way, developments in wearable technologies thus seem to draw a circular pathway back to using our bodies as proto-screens. This dynamic forces us to seriously rethink not only our body’s status in its relation to the agencies of digital devices producing peculiar bodily experiences we could characterize as dividualizing, but also the modern notion of “individuality” as such. On this subject, we must remember that the word individual—which, as we know, is foundational of modernity—literally means indivisible. However, our contemporary condition seems to make us increasingly experience dividuation, understood as the trend of simultaneous partition and pluralization of our identities, mainly due to the digital proliferation of our relations through screens. Indeed, such a proliferation is achieving the multiplication of new types of selves (“decentered” psychological selves, anonymous or identifiable digital selves, dividualized socioeconomic selves produced by datafication processes), which predictably will come more and more into conflict with the structures and categories of modernity centered on the notion of individual. The authors propose interpreting such a conflicting condition from the standpoint of a relational ontology (i.e., stating the ontological primacy of relations with respect to identities) also reminiscent of the anthropological notion of dividual in non-Western cultures.