SXSW: I understand that you were born with reduced hearing capacity. How does the hearing you have after receiving the cochlear implant compare with what you had growing up?

CHOROST: It fascinates me that it's both better and worse. Better, in that my acuity for soft sounds is enormously more sensitive than when I had hearing aids. Then, I could hear a clock ticking maybe five feet away. Now, it's twenty or thirty feet. It feels like my arms are five times longer than they used to be. But music sounds worse – flat and dull – because the implant's software is designed for speech, which is much simpler than music, acoustically speaking. But that may change with better software. I've already been upgraded once, and I look forward to more.

SXSW: Is it true that with a cochlear implant you can plug in directly into a stereo player? How does this work?

CHOROST: Yes, it is. In fact, as I'm writing to this I'm plugged into my own laptop, piping National Public Radio directly into my implant's processor. It's got an audio input jack for just this purpose. The sound never exists as vibrations in the air.

SXSW: How does the evolution of surgeries such as this change standard notions of our "natural" human body?

CHOROST: I wouldn't pretend to know what the "standard notion" of the body is, or even whether there ever was one. People have been modifying their bodies for millennia. But there is a kind of standard notion of the cyborg, fed to us by Hollywood: human beings hijacked by implanted body parts into acting like zombies. I think it reflects a deep fear that machines will dehumanize us. I felt some of that fear when holding the computer chips that would go into my head. I knew they wouldn't make me into a zombie, but I didn't know what to expect either, and that uncertainty was very frightening. The experience turned out to be as profound and surprising as I could have imagined, and in the book I try to convey some of the things I learned. For example, I talk about getting used to the fact that software upgrades radically change the way the world sounds to me. I suddenly had a programmable body. But that was a very humanizing experience, because being able to fuss with the software let me make thoughtful choices about what kind of body and auditory world I wanted to live in. A lot of the book is about the importance of taking ownership of a cyborg body on its own computational terms – not being afraid of its code, being willing to learn how it works, and systematically experimenting and trying new things.

SXSW: Is implant surgery such as this analogous to the use of steroids and other performance-enhancing substances? If we grow to accept implants as normal, will we also lose our traditional taboos against steroids?

CHOROST: I don't think they are analogous. Implants are medical devices that replace broken body parts, whereas steroids are biochemical enhancements that carry serious health risks. As for normality and taboos, my feelings about the aesthetics of my implant have changed radically over time. I found cochlear implants to be very creepy-looking devices at first. It was only when I visited my nursery school for the deaf a year or so after I was activated that I discovered how much my conception of what is frightening and what is beautiful has changed. In the book I talk about how the same thing is going on in our culture. Star Trek's almost pornographic fascination with the Borg, which are willfully ugly, is part of an ongoing reconsideration of what is ugly and what is beautiful, what is taboo and what is acceptable.

SXSW: How do you think all of this will evolve in the next 50 years? By 2050, will our bodies by a mass of computer implants? Will such procedures gain widespread acceptance, or do you think our society will evolve along two separate tracks -- humans versus cyborgs?

CHOROST: I think it's important to make a distinction between prosthetic implants and enhancement implants. Prosthetic technologies are certainly going to become more common in the future, but that won't mean anything for people with intact bodies. I think the future of enhancement technologies is much harder to predict. One thing I learned from getting a cochlear implant is how complex and unpredictable the body is, and that makes me wary of predictions that implanted devices will somedy be able to improve human senses and cognition beyond the normal. I'm not saying it won't happen, I'm just saying that it's very far off. Another point I want to make is that pinning one's hopes on gee-whiz future technologies lets people disregard how much can be done to improve human bodies right now, with sophisticated training and education. We tend to focus on the quick fix that gadgets seem to offer and ignore the subtle but rewarding work of learning how to fully use the bodies we have. The result is a tremendous waste of potential, and unless that attitude changes, we won't realize more than a fraction of what tomorrow's technologies may offer.

SXSW: In September of 2001, "60 Minutes" did a story on the resistance of some parts of the deaf community to cochlear implants. Has the deaf community developed a greater acceptance of this procedure over the last four years? Are there any other communities that have found this surgery morally offensive?

CHOROST: I should first say that I'm not a member of the signing deaf community, never having learned sign language, and therefore can't be construed as speaking for them. But I know the reason some signing deaf people resist cochlear implants is because children who get them can now grow up speaking more or less normally, which means that their normally hearing parents won't send them to schools where they'll learn American Sign Language. The implications for the signing deaf community are obvious: the vanishing of a language, a culture, a way of life. That's what makes the controversy so heated and so bitter. But in Chapter 8 of my book I look at recent events in the signing deaf community and conclude that the debate has calmed down a lot in the past five years. Conferences on cochlear implants don't get picketed anymore. In the book I put together several sets of numbers and discuss some significant trends in the demographics of the signing deaf community. It'll be interesting to see how people react; I say things in the book which I don't think have ever been said in print before.

SXSW: Do you unequivocally recommend the cochlear implant surgery to others? Are there any people that you would not recommend this surgery to?

CHOROST: Cochlear implants are not for everybody. An adult who's never heard sound her entire life won't have developed an auditory cortex that can interpret the input, and so the implant won't give her more than a rough awareness of sound. And, of course, if a person chooses to remain deaf and live in the signing deaf community, they have every right to that choice.

SXSW: Do you think "Rebuilt" will inspire more people to have this kind of surgery?

CHOROST: Yes, I do. It's become a safe and generally successful technology. There are always risks in surgery, of course. But you have to balance them against the even larger long-term risks of being deaf, particularly when it comes to children. Fifty percent of the deaf people in this country are unemployed. I'd say that's a much graver risk than the short-term risk of the surgery.

SXSW: Now that you've had the cochlear implant surgery, can you see yourself having other similar procedures in the future? If so, what is next on your list of implant enhancements?

CHOROST: My surgeon is urging me to consider implanting my other ear, so that I'll have two functional ears. But right now, there's no crisis and no strong motivation to go through the complex process of surgery and activation a second time. I do very well with one ear. Perhaps someday. As for the rest of my body, it works fine, so I have no plans. By the way, your readers are welcome to check out Rebuilt on my web site, michaelchorost.com. ]]> default 2005-05-18T17:07:00-05:00 http://2005.sxsw.com/bits_n_bytes/pivot/entry.php?id=22 http://2005.sxsw.com/bits_n_bytes/pivot/entry.php?id=22#comm Audio from Dan Gillmor's presentation and the Future of Podcasting panel at the 2005 SXSW Interactive Festival are now available online via a partnership with IT Conversations. Also available online is author Malcolm Gladwell's March 13 keynote at SXSW Interactive. Hear Gillmor explain how grassroots journalists are dismantling Big Media's monopoly on the news, transforming it from a lecture to a conversation -- as well as the latest on the very popular podcasting with experts such as Dannie Gregoire and Tom Parish. Also -- don't miss the Quicktime footage of Dan Gillmor's presentation, as well as Gladwell's keynote in our 2005 Video Coverage Archive. 22@http://sxsw.com/interactive/bits_n_bytes/ Audio from Dan Gillmor's presentation and the Future of Podcasting panel at the 2005 SXSW Interactive Festival are now available online via a partnership with IT Conversations. Also available online is author Malcolm Gladwell's March 13 keynote at SXSW Interactive.

Hear Gillmor explain how grassroots journalists are dismantling Big Media's monopoly on the news, transforming it from a lecture to a conversation -- as well as the latest on the very popular podcasting with experts such as Dannie Gregoire and Tom Parish.

Also -- don't miss the Quicktime footage of Dan Gillmor's presentation, as well as Gladwell's keynote in our 2005 Video Coverage Archive.

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