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 Cyborg?
I have just read the text by Shields (2006). The content about cyborgs was interesting. He seems to questioning the human representation of the cyborg, preferring “a virus, a ‘mote’ or ‘crumb’”. The mote and the crumb do not make sense to me, but I am quite taken with re-forming the cyborg as a virus. It seems, at first glance, to be fairly appropriate as a virus and the cyborg contain many corresponding characteristics:
mutation
latching on
can be all encompassing
they spread
they require hosts
However, the image of the word ‘virus’ carries many negative connotations, too:
requires a cure
can be terminal
disease and dis-ease
it is a coloniser
it can take over
I can see all of these characteristics in the cyborg, too, but to re-name it a virus may pander to the darker perspective that is already ‘out there’. Also, in some ways, the analogy with a virus does not, as far as I am concerned, fit. A virus is blind, whereas for me, the cyborg and the thinking that it encourages, is all seeing, like Argos (the mythical creature with many eyes, not the ubiquitous store with many catalogues…). The cyborg can lead us into thinking in such a way that we become more vigilant tothe multi-faceted nature of our surroundings and ourselves. It leads us into a kaleidoscope of subjectivities and dancing objectivities. So, not a virus, then, but possibly a spider: eight-eyed and weaving and woven by its own web.
 Spider
This week has been about cyborgs. There have been cyborgs everywhere. Once I was able to cut through the visual imagery of the Terminator and Bladerunner, I found it much easier to think ‘cyborg’. Haraway (2000) and Hayles (1999, 2006) seem both to be saying that the cyborg can be used to think in new ways. It is a way of rethinking who we are at different times and adjusting ourselves the idea of having multiple objectivities.
I especially liked Hayles (1999) text. Whereas Haraway’s Manifesto, while calling into question the notion of the transcendent Self, uses the discourse of transcendence, I felt that Hayles brought things back to earth with her professed aim of embodying virtuality: showing that its development and ubiquity can be traced to mundane social factors and that it is considered in certain ways as a result of historic and human-made endeavours. ‘At the same time, we can acquire resources with which to rethink the assumptions underlying virtuality, and we can recover a sense of the virtual that fully recognizes the importance of the embodied processes constituting the lifeworld of human beings.’ (Hayles, 1999, p 21).
As for my own activities on the blog – I have ‘tweeted’ some of my posts, but it seems to be such a silly thing to do that I am afraid I gave it up. It just isn’t in my nature to call out to people ‘hey, I’ve written something’ – it smacks too much of performance for me. Having said that, I have really enjoyed being sent some comments and getting back in touch with those people. Maybe I just prefer a more serendipidous approach to disseminating what is here, for all that is worth….
Instead of being this  - Plato’s androgyne – his metaphor for love in which we are bifurcated beings, constantly looking for our literal ‘other half’ in order to gain the illusive ‘wholeness’ of self, according to Haraway, we become this  : a multitude identities, the possession of which causes no conflict as we no longer pine for Eden as there is no recognition of a Golden Age in which we were in selfless union with some ‘whole’.
The artwork to the left, the wheel, is by a student who wanted to represent our dynamic identities in a continuously evolving piece of art. The dynamism of the art represents the non-static nature of identities.
Does reliance on assistive software make us a cyborg? Is the use of distributed cognition, via this reliance, an example of ‘cyborgness’? If this is the case then if when school children or students are allowed to take calculators into exams, and rely on this technology in order to answer the questions (that is, they do not know how to work out the problem unassisted, but they are able to use the relevant application to get the answer) does this mean that we are nurturing the cyborg within?
According to a geology lecturer I was talking to recently, he would be able to ‘be’ a geologist without the digital technology available to him. I do not think that a lecturer in IT would be able to ‘be’ without digital technology as the raison d’etre of her job is tied so tightly to the the type of technology she uses. Is she then, to a certain extent, in one of her identities, living as a cyborg? Does this course make me a cyborg? Is that what you were setting out to do?
(Wikipedia, Nov 12th, 09 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflexivity_(social_theory):
Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things can be said to touch on the issue of Reflexivity. Foucault examines the history of western thought since the Renaissance and argues that each historical epoch (he identifies 3, while proposing a 4th) has an episteme, or “a historical a priori“, that structures and organizes knowledge. Foucault argues that the concept of man emerged in the early 19th century, what he calls the “Age of Man”, with the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. He finishes the book by posing the problem of the age of man and our pursuit of knowledge- where “man is both knowing subject and the object of his own study”; thus, Foucault argues that the social sciences, far from being objective, produce truth in their own mutually exclusive discourses.
Is this what Hayles (1999) is talking about – that we make our own discourses by putting them into practice? If this is the case, then is it a case of if I think ‘posthuman’, I am posthuman. Anyone know how to put that into Latin?
http://web.physik.rwth-aachen.de/~hebbeker/lectures/ph3_0203/escher.gif
Some thoughts on Hayles (1999).
It seems that being posthuman is a state of mind – a subjectivity. It is a multitude of subjectivities which we draw upon in different contexts. And here are the some – I know they are images of Justice, but for me, they are women analysing and weighing things up :
  
This is my virtual ethnography. I have focused on a Flickr photosharing group called ‘Japan Top 20′. This is an edited version of the first ethnography I posted. However, I have kept Jen and Sian’s comments in.
http://digitalculture-ed.net/saraht/2009/11/11/virtual-ethnography/
I just found this interview with Tom Boellstorff, the author of ‘Coming of Age in Second Life’. One part of the interview stood out to me as I am struggling to come to terms with the virtual ethnography project. I am finding the ethnography a very partial piece of research as I am not including any of the participants’ voices and I am not in contact with any of them. I was wondering about how people who research virtual worlds interact with their informants. Boellstorff mentions how he has been tacken to task by many in his field, anthropology, because he did not attempt to contact his informants outside of Second Life. He states that such contact is unnecessary as it is enough to get to know the participants in the context in which they are being researched as such environments are ‘robust enough that there are forms of social relations in them that aren’t just mimicking or predicated on stuff that’s happening in the physical world. And as a result, we as researchers have to follow the ball. We have to go where they are, and in this case that means go online’.
Therefore, from Boellstroff’s perspective, these are discrete worlds that can be encountered as separate from, and without reference to, any other type of world. If, as Anderson (1983) states, communities are imagined, maybe our worlds now can be too, especially as we have virtual ones.
[ted id=657]
Ted Talks – David Hanson on ‘Robots that Share Emotion’
Danson is working on robots that can build relationships with people by showing empathy via recognising and mimicking facial expressions. He calls this area of study ‘character robotics’. It seems that he has already developed a ’spokesbot’ for the animatronic/robotic community.
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