“The posthuman subject is an amalgam, a collection of heterogeneous components, a material-informational entity whose boundaries undergo continuous construction and reconstruction.” (Hayles 1999, 3) One of the structuring principles of this course – the lifestream and the learning environment itself – is about disaggregation and reaggregation – taking things apart, scattering them across the network, and then having them put back together by the machine. What other connections might there be between cyborg theory and the pragmatics of online pedagogy and course design?
One of the key aspects of Hayles’ argument that resonated with me is her notion of the history of intellectual and scientific development having a seriated pattern – in the shape of a tiger’s iris.
In the history of cybernetics…[ideas] were fabricated in a pattern of overlapping replication and innovation, a pattern that I call “seriation” (a term appropriated from archaeological anthropology)…[where] changes in artifacts are … mapped through seriation charts…[by] parsing an artifact as a set of attributes that change over time…The figures that … emerge from this kind of analysis are shaped like a tiger’s iris – narrow at the top when an attribute first begins to be introduced, with a bulge in the middle during the heydey of the attribute, and tapered off at the bottom as the shift to a new model is completed. pp.14-15 Hayles, N. K. (1999) “Towards embodied virtuality” in Hayles, N.K., we became posthuman:virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics, Chicago: U of Chicago Press
Linked to this notion of seriated development is the importance of skeuomorphs:
A skeuomorph is a design feature that is no longer functional in itself but that refers back to a feature that was functional at an earlier time. [this term is borrowed from archaeological anthropology]… Skeumorphs visibly testify to the social or psychological necessity for innovation to be tempered by replication…they are so deeply characteristic of the evolution of concepts and artifacts that it takes a great deal of conscious effort to avoid them. p. 17 Hayles, N. K. (1999) “Towards embodied virtuality” in Hayles, N.K., we became posthuman:virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics, Chicago: U of Chicago Press
She continues:
[Skeuomorphs] call into a play a psychodynamic that finds the new more acceptable when it recalls the old that it is in the process of displacing and finds the traditional more comfortable when it is presented in a context that reminds us we can escape from it into the new. p.17 Hayles, N. K. (1999) “Towards embodied virtuality” in Hayles, N.K., we became posthuman:virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics, Chicago: U of Chicago Press
The lifestream aspect in the course is a way the ‘machine’ aggregates and assembles for us the disparate information we collect, the stray thoughts we may have etc. as we traverse the digital world. BUT it is us who provides meaning. The ‘machine’ provides no interpretation or sensemaking of the material it aggregates. Our human mind makes the connections, provides the context for why this information was noted in the first place. This is consistent with Hayles’ notion of an embodied virtuality. And blogging about the lifestream on a regular basis is important – otherwise, meaning would be lost in an evergrowing lifestream list. In designing an online course ’skeuomorphs’ may need to be designed into the course to make the new elements more acceptable. I hesitate to say that a blog is a ’skeuomorph’ as it is a new digital form or genre. But it has elements that hark back to journal keeping – albeit a very public one. Maybe for some types of students it needs to be kept private – as it is the case in IDEL. The keeping of a private blog is in a sense a skeuomorph – harking back to an old form but a more comfortable form that may help make blogging more comfortable for the novice.
