Today I was excited to speak at BoCo, a great new conference developed by the Boulder Tech Community, especially Andrew Hyde. Rick Turoczy was there, among other awesome Portlanders, San Fransiscans, and Boulderites. It  was a sunny day and there were beautiful mountains all around. The morning sessions dealt with food and music and were very wonderful to listen to.

I spoke about Cyborg Anthropology, which is the study of human computer interactions and how technology affects the way in which we communicate with one another.

We Are All Cyborgs

When you read this, you are acting as a low-tech cyborg, because you are using a computer to view text that I have written. My writing is stored here in my website, part of my actor network of external technological devices that, when taken together, comprise my technosocial self. As cavemen, we began skipping evolution by crafting spears instead of growing teeth. We began making hammers as extensions of our fists.

My social self is part technology and part human. My technological self does a lot of networking for me through my social networking profiles and my Google search results. So do yours (if you have them). My technosocial avatar of a self networks for me when I’m not there.

Distributed Social Selves

Each piece of my distributed social identity leaves a geological trail of past self that my present self can interact with. These all comprise my future self, which your future self or selves will most undoubtedly interact with. The online optimization of self, when coupled with the analog optimization of self (i.e. real-life networking, person to person) is the creation of a stable identity that is uniformly distributed and presented all over the web.

Technology Resembles Magic

Technology is almost magical. Like the scrying pool of the past (or of fantasy novels), the iPhone or computer monitor allows us to view anything anywhere in the world through YouTube and Twitter, News sites and Facebook. We can summon up an image with a simple spell (a simple text entry into Google search or Twitter search) and we can extend our speech and ears across very large distances in seconds with the mere touch of a button.

Technology Gives Us Superpowers

Technology, when used well, gives us amazing superpowers. We are like gods, until we forget to charge our batteries. We are like gods, until we forget to upgrade our devices to the most recent operating system or device number. Our external prosthetic devices turn against us when they get old. Our old clothes go out of style. Our brick phones make us get laughed at in the streets.

From Physical Transportation to Mental Transportation

In the same way that cars transport our physical bodies, computers and cell phones transport our spiritual bodies. Don’t like the word spiritual? Use the word mind instead. We’re increasingly entering into a world of mental machines - mental transportation devices. These devices transmit our thoughts invisibly to others. They are taking up smaller amounts of space, until vehicles, who require increasingly large highways.

Mental Traffic Jams

We have traffic jams, too. Mental traffic jams. Jams on Twitter. Twitter fails. Rush hour around important events and deaths and wars and crises. We can now have multiple views of the same event.

Telephonic Schizophrenia

When telephone technology first came out, people felt it was crazy. The idea of going into a room and speaking into a machine sounded schizophrenic.

More

There is more: enough to fill up a hour and a half speech, but I’ll leave that to you to see the next time I speak. Until then, you can follow me on Twitter @caseorganic, or you can check out BoCo.

If you’re like me, you’ve probably run into the problem of having your Mac’s screen dim while watching a long video. Or while you’re trying to demonstrate something, like software or a cool new data visualization tool.

Caffeine is a freeware software application that solves this problem by placing a tiny coffee cup in the menu bar that you can click on to keep your Mac awake for longer periods of time.

Just click to fill the coffee cup up with coffee, and you’ll be able to sit across the room and watch a DVD without having to touch the keypad every 5 minutes.

App Size

At 240 KB, Caffeine is a super-light app that won’t drag down your ability to run other processes (although if you leave it on, it will obviously drain your battery).

Download Caffeine for Mac

You can download Caffeine Mac App here (link is from Lightware software, Caffeine’s development team).

Turning Caffeine off and On

When you want your Mac to stay awake, simply click on the coffee cup and it will fill with awesome black coffee. And when you want to turn it off, just click the mug again, and the caffeine will disappear, giving your tired computer a much-needed break.

From a usability point of view, this simple on/off system makes Caffeine one of the simplest apps ever (binary sweetness).

I use this handy thing every day, so I figured I should probably let others know about it. Enjoy with a cup of real coffee.

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Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist and Tech Blogger from Portland, Oregon. You can follow her online at @caseorganic.