I have been getting ready for my assignment this week. I am still drawing together fragments of post humanism and the notion of the cyborg in my lifestream. For my digital essay I am going to create a build in Second Life. This will mainly be informed by the notions of Haraway’s cyborg and Hayles post humanism.

It has been an intense but very creative couple of weeks. The readings have been really thought provoking. I have begun to be more selective in what I choose to feed through my lifestream. I am still looking at posthumanism. Enjoyed reading Katherine Hayles, On becoming Posthuman and finding references to support the reading. There is a lot of information on the web on post and trans humanism and it was a bit of a task trying to find course relevant information. I was intrigued by Hayle’s notion of disembodiment of knowledge and ‘distributed cognition’. I see now that this lifestream may be a ’reembodiment’ of these scattered fragments

It has been a very exciting couple of weeks. The ethnographies that colleagues produced were both wonderful and varied. It has been fascinating to track the inception of these works through lifestreams, blog postings and tweets. This is really an exciting new way to work. This week I started to feed through both resources on cyborgs and post humanism, two very interesting theories. Like most other people I found the Haraway reading difficult to analyse. However, I feel that what she as trying to do was foreground the cultural and sexual connotations which surround discussion around most issues to do with both men and women by creating a non gendered ‘cyborg’, almost a new life form which cannot really be classified in terms of gender. I think that this addresses the binaries which surround gender. I also started gathering references to Psthumanism. One quote from Max More, (1994) defined Posthumanism for me in succinct terms:

“. Humanity is a temporary stage along the evolutionary pathway. We are not the zenith of nature’s development. It is time for us to consciously take charge of ourselves and to accelerate our transhuman progress.”  http://www.maxmore.com/becoming.htm

This week has been a post ethnography project week zfter the intensity of producing the micro ethnographic study.This block has been very enjoyable and thought provoking. I spent this week still finding ethnographic resources to feed into my lifestream. I finally built my micro-ethnography around the virtual Dublin community in Second Life. I have really enjoyed reading other students’ ethnographies and like me, I feel that their finished work is in parts a reflection of the resources they have gathered in their lifestreams. I am interested in the idea of carrying out ethnographic studies in virtual worlds as it is such a new field of study, well, a virtual field.

I have really enjoyed this week, hunting down resources for my micro-ethnography and feeding through my lifestream. I have found a few articles and reviews based around the work of Christine Hine and these have been a big help to me. I have been finding information for my lifestream which defines what ethnography is and its key concepts and terms and how  a micro ethnography differs. I also fed information into my lifestream on virtual ethography and how this is gaining status as a new form of ethnograpic study. I have mainly used Delicious and I have decided to do my micro-ethnography on the Dublin community within Second Life. Second Life is becoming a popular place for ethnographic studies; Tom Boellstorff’s ethnography, Coming of Age in Second Life is a comprehensive study of this environment in which he immersed himself as a resident called, Tom Bukowski for three years. I downloaded chapter one, free, from his website and found this very useful http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8647.html. As an active resident of Second Life for about a year now I am beginning to become intrigued by the questions about identity that it raises and indeed the whole idea of what ‘virtual’ really means. In my ethnography I have experimented with creating video with voiceover for part of my ethnography. This week in my llifestream I shall be focusing on Second Life and ethnography and ways to present ethnography from within an online environment such as this.