Tag Archives: cyborg

Week 10 – Back in the loop

December 13, 2009

This week I concentrated on the course readings in preparation for the tutorial on Skype on the Wednesday of the week. Interestingly there is no way to properly represent the Skype tutorial – which was really useful for talking through some of the post human, critical and uncanny views – in my lifestream so this is probably the one reference you’ll see to it in the form of an additional reading:

  • Shared New Mappings ｷ Hauntologies. — 11:00pm via Delicious

And three podcasts that I listened to again when reading about the idea of absence, presence and cyborgism as the podcasts relate to notions of consciousness and self-awareness, of the body as a type of mystical machine:

  • Shared WNYC - Radiolab: Who Am I? (February 04, 2005). — 2:50am via Delicious

  • Shared WNYC - Radiolab: Where Am I? (October 09, 2007). — 2:50am via Delicious

  • Shared WNYC - Radiolab: Memory and Forgetting (June 08, 2007). — 2:49am via Delicious

Also the much more visceral Tetsuo Man – human literally turning to machine – came to mind in this weeks preparation:

  • Shared YouTube – Tetsuo: The Iron Man trailer. — 2:46am via Delicious

But, in fact, many of my notes and collecting for this course are hard to represent here in true “commonplacing” style because, although I do most of my collecting online, I still take quite a lot of notes on paper, particularly on the readings (although you can just about see my camera cord as well!):

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I also do some hybrid reading/activity marking up paper copies and notes whilst reading/watching or getting my computer to read me material I’m interested in. That mixture of tangible and virtual is often the easiest way to both take in information and (via a finite number of pieces of paper!) trigger myself to retrieve those thoughts later on. In fact I rarely do more than glance at hand written notes but the physical experience of writing them, where they are on the page, when I remember making them, etc. all enable me to recall information better than a screen that looks the same (or almost the same) each visit. There are digital annotation tools but you can’t embed weird environmental aspects – annotations at all angles, in many pen colours, marks from cups or food (gross but memorable aspects in any marked up page) – that aid memory. I find sound – whether screen-readings of text or unrelated audio also give me a sense of time and place to add to my memory of new information so that I can mentally retrieve ideas more easily and so that I can recall context and the original ideas and thoughts triggered, hence:

  • Drinking chai, getting my screen-reader to help me do readings for #ededc (dulcet robot tones push my reading speed way up!) & pondering bed [suchprettyeyes] — 12:04am via Twitter

This week I’ve also been up to some non-online stuff – wracking my mind for my preferred topic for the digital essay assignment – and then sharing thoughts as I go via Twitter:

  • Food for thought for tonights #ededc and the critical/posthuman view. The net rewires how we think… for the better: http://bit.ly/5uVmpU [suchprettyeyes] — 5:34pm via Twitter

  • @jar thanks ;) Will whip some ideas into better shape for then! :D [suchprettyeyes] — 2:35pm via Twitter

I also hoped to – but wasn’t able to in the end – view the virtual graduations of MSc in e-Learning colleagues via the Virtual University of Edinburgh.

  • Shared Graduates virtually guaranteed a day to remember | 4TM Services for Tourism.— 1:02am via Delicious

  • Delighted to see MSc in elearning virtual graduation getting pimped up on BBC: http://bit.ly/4mUBj8 #ededc #mscidel etc. [suchprettyeyes] — 11:27am via Twitter

Although it wasn’t quite as pioneering there was another interesting culture and technology story getting a lot of press coverage: Desert Island Discs – long running Radio 4 interview show with a twist – emerged as a podcast with Morissey the first guest to become downloadable as an MP3:

  • DID is now a podcast which is as exciting as Mr M’s app RT @media_guardian: Mellow Morissey picks Desert Island Discs http://bit.ly/7j0VTM [suchprettyeyes] — 5:38pm via Twitter

Podcasting certainly isn’t news but the novel aspect of Desert Island Disc being a podcast is that it is one of the most mainstream of Radio 4’s shows to get the treatment and hits some interesting legal boundaries: the show itself is a licensed format (“from an original idea by Roy Plomley”) which was only added to Listen Again this year after discussions with Plomley’s estate; and because the show uses music it also has to grapple with licensing costs/issues it has now been released with reduced music clips (under 30 seconds per clip) to bi-pass the potential legal problems and/or avoid the high music rights costs associated with the number of downloads a BBC podcast is likely to receive. Payment for content, and business models in general, are becoming increasingly important as most web services do not charge for content but few attract sufficient advertising to fully pay for costs. The most high profile commercial case lately has been the fight between Rupert Murdoch and Google over the indexing of original content in News International’s publications:

  • Shared Twitter chief to Murdoch: paying for internet content will not work | Technology | The Guardian.— 5:35pm via Delicious

  • Shared Bing Tries To Buy The News. — 12:59pm via Delicious

Although this case is about who makes money online from content there is also the issue of whether anyone is making any income/offsetting costs of original content. Indeed one of the recurring calls for donations on NPR shows revolves around publicising the costs associated with providing infrastructure for podcasts relying on a direct relationship with audiences. It’s a move that suggests – along with calls for user generated content, comment and participation – a shift towards more open and equal relationships between creator and audience:

  • Shared BBC News – Social media ‘could transform public services’.— 9:45pm via Delicious
    The NHS and other public services must re-organise themselves around the needs of users, say social media activists.

  • Shared Ask the former head of the WTO anything – Boing Boing. - 5:54pm via Delicious

  • Shared BBC NEWS | Scotland | Highlands and Islands | Gaelic TV channel being reviewed.— 4:26pm via Delicious

Although this week I was reminded of the insidious power of making the audience the star in this strange This American Life animation:

  • Shared “People act different behind cameras”: strangely disturbing cartoon – Ewan McIntosh | Digital Media & Education.— 5:42pm via Delicious
    Via Graham Linehans blog and Techcrunch is This American Life examining our attitudes to censorship, citizen journalism and how people change when they’re behind a camera.

And I may have been a rather gullible participant/audience member in taking part in what seems to be a study (with involvement from the University of Kent) – indeed a work of digital anthropology – but is very much presented on the Talk Talk website as a sort of advertorial “What Tribe are You” quiz. The downloadable report is a little better:

  • TalkTalk anthropology work on digital tribes (old news but new to me ;) . #ededc. http://bit.ly/3XOeqO [suchprettyeyes]— 3:35pm via Twitter

I found out that I was Digital Extrovert btw. Here’s how the study broke down the tribes:

Talk Talk Tribes

But it could all be one of the rash of somewhat dubious (social) science studies designed to market brands as legitimised by research :

  • Shared BBC NEWS | Programmes | More Or Less | Junk maths. — 4:36pm via Delicious

According to a piece I read in the Independent this week that 10+ hours of internet a day and endless over-sharing that makes me a Digital Extrovert may mean good things for my brain (in contrast to the press items about Susan Greenfield was making earlier this year):

  • Shared What the web is teaching our brains – Features, Health & Families – The Independent.— 5:35pm via Delicious

On a related note I was tweeted a video about groups, networks and both technology and in person teaching practice – it relates to the ideas of social networking and tools and ideas about pedagogies for classes and groups of students. It’s a mash up of comments on line and in person at the 2008 Connectivism and Connective Knowledge conference (CCK08):

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This week I did also find a worrying piece, however, about how absorbing computer games can be – I found this fascinating and again it seemed to link back to the idea of being fleetingly absent and present in online and offline space (although here online is digital but not necessarily networked). The relationship between the virtual, the physical and the emotional seemed fascinating here:

  • Shared Advisor: My husband has a virtual girlfriend – Boing Boing. — 1:00am via Delicious

And there have been some interesting petitions emerging this week as those with a close emotional and personal investment in the web protest against proposed changes to cut down on illegal file sharing activities with a zero tolerance 3 Strikes And You’re Out policy that would see the internet being disconnected from offending households. In UK law there are special provisions to ensure that water, electricity and gas cannot be cut off from homes even when bills are unpaid to ensure the well-being of residents, it seems that we are increasingly in a world where the internet may be added to this list of vital utilities for participation in modern democracy which would certainly make the proposed rule changes look draconian and in the interests only of those perusing income from rights fees:

  • Shared Britain’s new Internet law — as bad as everyone’s been saying, and worse. Much, much worse. – Boing Boing. — 4:37pm via Delicious

  • Shared Pirate Party UK – Blog – Questions for Lord Mandelson. — 4:32pm via Delicious

As I am not only working on this module but also getting myself organised for the next module – which will be Digital Game Based Learning – by keeping an eye out for digital gaming/culture crossover articles:

  • Shared BBC NEWS | Business | Playfish hooked by EA for ｣170m. — 1:53pm via Delicious

  • Shared Learning Games. — 1:07pm via Delicious

  • Shared A farewell to SLEx – Eloise’s thoughts and fancies. — 1:04pm via Delicious

  • Shared OER in Games, Sims and Virtual Worlds ｫ Learning Games. — 1:03pm via Delicious

Work also regularly overlaps with my lifestream since everything I do is digital these days. Two links I thought were particularly interesting this week were a presentation on visualisation which I saw recently and has now been posted to the web:

  • Shared giCentre presentation at Edina, November 2009. — 6:13pm via Delicious

Here the visualisations are used in interactive and informational ways which highlight something surprisingly new to the web – the power of the visual. Although graphic design has been important on websites for years it is interesting to see graphic design mix with mash-ups and programming on data to build powerful infographics – a corner of design previously used almost exclusively in television news/production and textbooks but increasingly emerging as a useful and widely used method of discovering information. However there are good and bad infographics and well scaled interactive examples – as featured in the link above – give a great ideas of how visualisation can be used in more demanding educational or research contexts.

I am almost coming to a close here but I did want to flag up an interesting logo I spotted and followed links to this week:

  • Shared Green Certified Site | CO2Stats. — 12:06pm via Delicious

This is a site which will calculate the CO2 impact of a website automatically (it’s not exactly clear how) and allows you to display and offset this through regular payment of carbon offsetting fees. I flag this up mainly as so-called Green IT is becoming a key issue particularly for educational and public sector organisations. For now there is a persistent perception that the internet is clean and non polluting as, unlike technology such as the petrol engine of a car, the sense of pollution is far removed from the physical experience. Politically the issue of access to the internet seems to continue to be seen as a priority in improving educational achievement, and environmental issues are a clear priority (especially when events like the Copenhagen summit are destined to be such big news). I therefore wonder if raised awareness of the environmental impact of data centres, charging ubiquitous devices, etc. and the apparent emergent trend of those not using the internet (a major group within non-internet users in this years Oxford Internet Survey) will gel into a social and political movement. Digital exclusion offers some tricky challenges but as that becomes more and more about personal choice rather than cost and/or opportunity there will be more difficult social issues raised about what access does or does not mean for participation in democracy, culture, education etc.

Finally, I thought I’d finish this week on something much more frivolous though it also illustrates both some of the first films we saw in this module, some of the vibrant fan culture work I saw in my digital ethnography, and the versatility of Danish construction toys (which I’ve also recently been buying for young nephews and nieces):

  • Shared The Matrix in LEGO – Boing Boing. — 1:08am via Delicious

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Cyborg and Post Human Adventures

December 2, 2009

I found this a really challenging week as the readings were dense but very stimulating. Initially when I thought about what a Cyborg might be the types of images I had in mind came from science fiction – like the 1989 Japanese film Tetsuo: The Iron Man (see trailer below though it is a little gory/edgy so possibly not safe for work/not for everyone) – and these images are very much about the (literal) fusing of man and machine.

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It was therefore quite a challenge to in some way relate my expectations to the picture Haraway (1) paints of the cyborg as a form of post gender idealism made whole and (almost?) physical. Before reading the Cyborg Manifesto I knew it to be a work on futurism and feminism but I found it hard to analyze and form my own opinion on the work due to the structure and range of issues included by Haraway as she critiques the status quo and sketches a possible cyborg future. I have attempted to consider the core readings with the questions raised by Jen and Sian as my starting point for reflection.

For a start I found some of Haraway’s arguments if not exactly expired had certainly lost their edge since the original publication of her Cyborg Manifesto in 1985. The political importance of nuclear weapons in the world has significantly changed since the end of the cold war and the fall of communism in eastern Europe in the years following 1989. Although many cyborg developments can still be traced to military technology I also think the role of the education, medical and commercial sectors actually have a far greater impact now than at the time Haraway was writing.

I think in fact that the end of the cold war and increasing global dominance of capitalist power has shifted the power balance in ways perhaps not envisioned by Haraway. Military funding of technology remains highly influential but there are reasons to see recent conflict as driven by commerce rather than politics or idealism and that is a type of aggression that is both post-partisan (in a very cyborg way) and promiscuously frightening. I don’t think this situation is entirely beyond Haraway’s image of the cyborg but I think the reality is that much more negative than the picture she paints.

I think there is actually a curious bilateralism of influence occuring as the military commissions private sector gaming companies to create training games – because the technology developed for commercial gaming is both the most leading edge of it’s type and the gameplay experience most closely aligned to the experience and expectations of new recruits. In turn such commissions develop and maintain expertise that is reused in increasingly realistic commercial war games that will contribute to forming attitudes and understanding of the world to future voters and recruits. There is something intriguing and alarming about the unequal bridging of commerce, war and embodiment – the apparent subject of the forthcoming James Cameron film Avatar – that might allow conflict to be conducted partially or wholly in game or virtual environments given the sophisticated, often remote and highly automated weapons systems that now so resemble a form of disconnected gaming.

The role of women in society has changed significantly (perhaps more so in the UK than in the US because of the broad and swift changes to European social policy changes including the almost total legal unacceptability of sexual discrimination in recruitment, increased and mandatory periods of paid maternity leave, increased rights for part time workers etc.) but in both cases the realm of women certainly now includes work – frequently in addition to caring responsibilities around home, family and children – in a much more significant way.

Fertility rights of women have also changed due to the (relative) mainstreaming of older pregnancies, IVF, donar insemination etc. and this (along with very little change in the available male roles in selective fertility/birth control and only limited paternity leave and rights) has not just opened up opportunities but has also forced women – in a very cyborg way – to continuously make conscious choices about their role in society and their role in their private life. At the same time the mainstreaming of pornography, the impact of Viagra, the increased rate of divorce (and later age dating and remarriage) and the rise of the energetic pensioner have all brought about the expectation that women will be youthful and sexual at all ages. This may enable exciting new senses of self and embodiment but increased visibility of high profile older women – who selectively model their appearance on a continuation of impression of youth – has led to a more homogeneous acceptable face of femininity and female power. Advances in modern medicine and biotechnology have huge impact with Botox and hair dye having physical and cultural effects far beyond the reach of the type of cosmetic surgeries that were available twenty years ago.

] There is nothing female that naturally binds women

- Haraway (1). p. 38

In fact despite the gender-blurring that has occurred since the writing of the manifesto – including the increased visibility of all types of sexualities and literally post-gender trans people – there has been a curious polarization of genders enabled by technologies around implants, cosmetic surgeries etc. but not driven by them. Modern humans are not only not post gender but the modern face of idealised womanhood is a faux youthful and hyper feminized mixture of inflated and airbrushed lips, breasts and hair with large childlike eyes. Despite a current resurgence of 1980’s fashion styles it is not the genderless 1940s inspired shoulderpads of professional women that have returned but the sloanish fashions of privilege and passivity. Even the more gender neutral styles adopt highly gendered ontologies that refer to a conceptual space not the cut or true origins of the garment, for example the Boyfriend cardigan/blazer/etc. The increased hyper feminisation of appearance seems, in part, an extreme reaction to the blurring social roles between men and women. Society seems set on the importance of strongly articulated gender and, because only a minority of women subscribing to the notion of being a surrendered wife or an idealistic Martha Stewart soccer mom, ultra feminine fashion and increased attention on appropriate grooming (for both genders: stubble and/or aggressively showy styles for men; obsessively hairless bodies and long hair for women) is the (capitalist) way to compensate for increasingly comparable careers, blurred child care roles and empowerment across genders. In other words the cyborg – if that is a relevant term for current experience – is not post gender but in fact amplifies subtle differences that potentially undermine any post feminist or post gender gains.

Haraway indicates that the cyborg will be ubiquitous, virtually invisible and this remains resonant in a world of smart phones, bionic body parts and automated processes. Though the technology here has moved on greatly since the Manifesto it is one area of the piece that I feel has dated most strongly as the ethical and moral questions remain pertinent and unresolved. This is one area where the fear of technology remains many years after Haraway took as read an assumption that cyborgs were likely to be perceived primarily as threats.

Haraway’s ideas of binaries and paradoxes has aged less well and an interview from 1997 [5] casually rejects the simplicity these implied. I do not feel we have become cyborg enough to float above these binaries but I do question that they were ever capable of such neat definition. The core Cartesian mind/body duality though is a harder to deal with. Reading through the Manifesto I felt Haraway framed the duality so clearly in spiritual terms that her own Catholic upbringing was forefronted. As someone without any religious faith or beliefs I do not see the “spirit” as a valid human form exactly but, realistically, I do articulate my function in the third party as a split of intelligence and, for want of a better phrase, meat. I came to the conclusion, reading [1] that in fact I see the body as one intrinsically connected machine with the nervous system and brain at it’s core and everything else a sensor, tool or other connector between processing and the external world. That is a mind/body split of sorts but it is also a matter of seeing skin as the ultimate in sensor technology, the eye as the very best camera in the world, and the body as more than a disposable husk for a brain. Shallow elements like appearance also effect the development and behaviour of a person and so, on a different level, there is also an important connect between body and consciousness (and I think conciousness is the word I would give to the mind/spirit or similar notion).

Cogito, ergo sum.

- René Descartes

Hayles (2) raised the condition of post humanism and I found this to be a fascinating and complimentary theory to Haraways cyborg ideology. Post humans are, from what I understood of Hayles, far more about the practical elements of joining humans to machines or at least to non-natural elements. This is where the fusing of body parts, the development of artificial joints and limbs, the idea of backing up ones memory to the machine or the internet comes in. And in fact I was reminded of three powerful radio programmes from the NPR RadioLab series: Who Am I?; Where Am I?; and Memory & Forgetting. Each explores the nature of consciousness and being and the role that the physical body has on an articulate understanding of the world and the self. Hayles takles aesthetic post humanism head on – having the luxury of 14 years more of medical technologies at the time of writing – as a part of the evolution of post human forms, something that relates back to Haraway’s notion of a superior form (of cyborg) emerging and her own professional background in evolutionary biology.

Perhaps the most powerful element of Hayles (2) though is her insistence that it is the cross pollination between disciplines and futurists that allows powerful holistic ideas to emerge. Although her own perspective is literary she pays homage to the role of science and broader colleagues. This interlinking of expertise and ideas is, perhaps, in itself a reflection of the power of networks (of all kinds) and of the power of machines in aiding discovery and communication between scholars and in processing information so that human interactions can be distilled to their most useful creative connective functions.

I found Hayles (3) a really useful piece for reflecting on Haraway and particularly the notion of consciousness and embodied self but Sheilds (4) was, to me, a curious read as it seemed to come so firmly from a practical and male perspective that it jarred oddly with the rest of the key readings here. As you would imagine I could not entirely disagree with his new sites of Body and Web but I certainly disagree with his reasons for their inclusion. In fact I felt that Body had already, to some extent, been dealt with as Haraway wanted to and her own choice had been to indicate a post gender post human form. There are cultural issues (as I have highlighted above) around how, in practice, this actually takes place but I do not see the body as distinct from the rest of the person as Sheilds evidently does. I see the body as part of the engine of human/cyborg machines.

The inclusion of the web as a site actually also seems curiously out of date. For me personally I do not see the web as sitting outside my experience of the world: it is not a unique space but (as discussed in Bayne (6)) one of many distributed embodiments of my own self. It is not a special site in terms of how I define myself any more than any other embodied space. In effect both new spaces Sheild proposes seem comparitively irrelevant given the scale of issues and ideologies that Haraway sets her sights on.

I found this entire set of readings (and those that I will reflect on as part of my Week 10 summary) very stimulating though broadly I disagreed with much of what was being said. Haraway in particular appealed to me – and my strong sense of feminism – but seemed so of it’s time and of it’s creator’s era that I felt quite isolated and distant from the images of politics (personal and state), ideology and feminist orthodoxy painted.

References

  1. Haraway, D. (2000). A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late 20th Century. in D Bell and A Kennedy, The Cybercultures Reader. Routledge.
  2. Hayles, N.K. (1999). Toward embodied virtuality, chapter 1 of How we became posthuman: virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature and informatics. Chicago, University of Chicago Press. pp1-25
  3. Hayles, N.K. (2006). Unfinished Work: From Cyborg to Cognisphere. Theory Culture Society, 23/7-8.
  4. Shields, R. (2006). Flânerie for Cyborgs. Theory Culture Society, 23/7-8.
  5. Kunzru, H. (1997). You are Cyborg. Wired. Issue 5.02. Accessed 30th November 2009: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.02/ffharaway.html.
  6. Bayne, S. (forthcoming, March 2010). Academetron, automaton, phantom: uncanny digital pedagogies. London Review of Education. [revised version uploaded 10 November 09]
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