Our bodies, which understand how to do something when even the mind is not at work is a concept I had not really thought about before. I mean, our bodies automatically react to stimuli, when it’s cold we shiver; when it’s hot we sweat. These are automatic responses built into our systems. If they didn’t work, then we would die.

Habit is an interesting concept. I think that habit can help us and destroy us. We see destruction in smoking, drinking, other habit-forming substances. We can fall victim to habit even if it is not necessarily harmful to our bodies. This happened to me yesterday when I got off of the 5 train heading downtown at 42nd street to transfer to the 6 so I could get off at a local stop…but the local stop I wanted to go to was past Union Square. Every day I transfer to the 6 at Grand Central so I can get off at 23rd Street. My habit cost me 10 minutes. Of course I was upset, but I could talk my mind out of it realizing that there is nothing that I could do at that point. I just had to ride the stupid 6 train.

Connerton talks about the habits of the body. My train experience dealt with the mind, the mind remembering where to go and what to do. I suppose my body was involved, but this is something different than remembering keys on a keyboard. In both instances, however, one can make a mistake. In both instances, it can cost some time (as when we have to go back and fix what we messed up).

There are some things I want to address here, flaws in the mechanical engineering that we do with our bodies, and these “habits” and the mechanics of the keyboard–a machine that we use to write for us once our fingers (extensions of our bodies) figure out how to use it. When we engineer our bodies to do something like type on a keyboard, something that becomes a habit (and most of the times in a good way so that it can beneficial in our computer-mediated society and computer-based jobs), our bodies automatically expect that anything resembling that machine will be just like the one that we have used before. When I went to Italy, however, the keyboard that I started to use, while set up similarly, had different placement for important characters such as the “2” and even the apostrophe. It took me at least 5 minutes to figure out where these keys were, how to make them work, and then another 2 days or so to stop making the same mistake of putting some weird character I had never seen before instead of the “@”. All the emails I wrote to friends and family did not have apostrophes, so I apologized for my poor grammar. And I couldn’t figure out how to make colons, so I couldn’t make smilies (as most of us in the younger generation know, smilies are an important source of emotion). So my point is that when we program our bodies to do something, be it in the mind or in the actual body (such as the fingers) there is always room for error. Any sort of programming will always have some sort of error.

Every culture has habits that make up the individual. These habits can be changed over time. It seems like we as humans are born to take on habits, if we didn’t have them, we wouldn’t be able to handle our everyday lives. For example, without programming that we have to brush our teeth everyday, or feed a baby at a certain time…we wouldn’t be able to take care of ourselves. These actually are obligations that turn into habits because without someone teaching us, we wouldn’t know that we are supposed to do them in the first place. Furthermore, we can choose not to do them. The more that we don’t do them, the less we care about doing them correctly. We want to program ourselves to do the righ things in the right way, but someone has to teach us.

This brings me to humans and computers. Don’t we have to teach the computers how to make words happen on a word document? And then we teach humans how to type so that the computer can do it? In the end someone is teaching a computer, and someone is teaching the mechanics to a human. It all might be habits and mechanical, but it’s still all teachable and learned. You know what