Antennagate: can Schopenhauer help?

Ever since the media eruption over the iPhone 4′s antenna design, I’ve been thinking about how we assign meanings and experience real emotions in response to representations, or illusions.

Adapted from a photo by Jamais Cascio

Take the bars on your mobile phone. We are completely used to telling the person on the other end of the line that we “don’t have many bars”. Yet “bars” are just a way that mobile phones have of indicating how good a signal they have, not an actual measure of anything real. But by now we’re so used to them that we use them as though they were the actual thing rather than a representation of it, and we can have furious arguments about “dropping bars”.

Think about the way that Steve Jobs presented the way that the iPhone 4 and other smartphones suffer from signal attenuation when gripped in specific ways. He compared the upper limit of the number of bars displayed when gripped as recommended by the manufacturer against the lower limit of bars displayed when held “wrong”. Never did he mention the actual signal degradation in dBm, only ever the way that the phone manufacturer had chosen to represent them in terms of bars displayed. In one telling moment, he pointed out that the Android phone only used four bars, and yet he didn’t take the next logical step and conclude that we can say nothing meaningful about actual signal loss by looking at an abstract representation.

There was a storm of protest (from me too, I confess) when Apple published a “letter” explaining that the algorithm they used to calculate the number of bars to display was flawed and exaggerated the level of signal. We complained that this was simply deckchair rearrangement: the problem was a loss of signal, we insisted. What were Apple going to do about that? And yet the only evidence we had for the “loss of signal” was the representation – the bars themselves! That reaction occurred because we couldn’t handle the idea that the representation had been unhelpful because we do not see it as representation.

Photo by NomadicLass

We do this in other walks of life too. You’re driving along the motorway happily enough, perhaps conscious that you should take the next opportunity available to fill up the tank. You move one extra centimetre along the road using a few drops of fuel, and the car’s electronics trigger an indicator light on the dashboard. Suddenly all you can think about is conserving fuel, and maybe even taking a detour to find a closer petrol station. But the actual volume of fuel in the tank has decreased only very slightly. It’s only a guess, but I bet you could induce the same set of emotions by turning on the light even with the gauge showing the tank full. You’d probably want to go and check the fuel as soon as you could.

Or, think of the “spinning beachball of death” that the Mac displays instead of a mouse cursor when an application is too busy to be responsive to user input. It’s enough to make you quite irritated, and consider force-quitting the offending app, perhaps losing your work along the way. But every so often, the OS will screw up and show you the wrong mouse cursor so that the application is apparently “beachballing” while in fact being completely responsive. Yet the feeling of annoyance is still there, and there’s a lingering fear that the app may indeed stop responding to input very shortly. In such situations, I immediately save my work and then try to trick the application into displaying the correct cursor again by doing something that triggers another cursor change, such as moving the mouse over a splitview boundary. If that doesn’t work, I quit and restart the app. The nagging feeling of an impending crash is too distracting.

But what am I talking about? “Moving the mouse” is itself a symptom of this reliance on illusion. What I should say is “I move the mouse, triggering the operating system into moving the pointer over the screen”. But even that isn’t enough. What I really mean is “I move the mouse, triggering the operating system to furiously instruct pixels in the display to change colour, creating the illusion of a pointer moving over the monitor”. It’s exhausting!

One of they first things I do when I configure a new computeris to adjust the mouse’s “tracking speed” so that the mouse pointer moves in accordance with how fast I’m moving the physical mouse. I’m fairly sure that I always make it faster than the OS default. But my preference is merely a subjective feeling that it’s the “correct” speed; other users may find it far too fast or way too slow. And if the OS raised the default speed to my preferred speed, I’d probably still adjust it upwards.

When you get right down to it, our eyes are examples of this same phenomenon. We perceive a reality which we only ever infrequently stop to think about, and are largely ignorant of the fact that it’s only a representation of reality. The representation is so compelling, so realistic that we can’t help ourselves but to believe it. But you’d be unable to raise your arm at all if you forced yourself to consider the processes involved in human sight while trying to return a tennis serve, for example.

There has to be a word for this phenomenon, and I’d love to know what it is. My limited knowledge of philosophy suggests to me that this is what Schopenhauer spent the greater part of his life writing and thinking about. If there’s a technical term that encapsulates it, do please share it in the comments.