Perception-Forming Interfaces

What we perceive as reality is often considered as a mental and social construction that emerges from interactions with the world. Through these interactions individuals absorb impressions with their sensory organs that over time form a model of reality that gets projected onto the world. This model does not exclusively reside within the individual brain but exists and materializes itself in an interconnected web across living and non-living systems. That means, we experience and navigate the world through collective preconceptions that get activated and shaped through interactions. What if digital interfaces would mediate such construction of reality? Imagine common devices that overlay sensory organs such as glasses and headphones are equipped with digital functionalities for augmenting or adapting sensory impressions. This would manipulate the model through which people navigate the world, because it would shape the individual and collective construction of preconceptions. Hence, what might emerge is a new form of human-world relationship that gets shaped through principles of the digital. Even if interfaces do not seamlessly integrate into the intersection between a person and its environment, they could still influence and throughout time normalize a certain new form of perception. As such technologies develop further and get used more excessively we might reach a point where the physical world and digital overlays cannot be differentiated anymore. Due to the dominance of digital-economic dynamics its worldviews would most probably be embedded in such developments. This could lead to changes such as the curation of a person's view of the world by personalization algorithms, the enhancement of a person's understanding of the world through algorithmic pre-interpretation or the organization of social systems through synchronized individual action recommendations. Obviously this raises huge questions about how our relationship with the world might develop. Current ideas of freedom, agency, power, behavior or governance could get fundamentally disrupted what requires a thoughtful navigation with such developments.

May 16, 2025