Lots of activity this week, in a number of directions, a fact that’s indicative of how stimulating this course has been for me so far. I watched a lot of videos by M. Wesch, Haraday and Baudrillard, started looking at some other of N.K. Hayles’ books, used Twitter mainly for relaying links for interesting papers, [...]
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I was getting quite frustrated with the readings on cyborgs and posthumans, not that they weren’t interesting, but they were so embedded in western ideas of self and being and what it is to human (and therefore cease to be human) that I was beginning to think that mandatory courses in Eastern philosophy might be [...] References: 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. 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 I’ve been [...] The more I use this lifestream, the more I love it. I have found it invaluable to store resources, and the weekly summary forces me to draw them all back in together again, like unpicking a tangled ball of wool! I have been using Tumblr to store interesting quotes from the reading as I go through [...] Silvana has left a comment in response to my previous blog entry Defining posthumans where she states that: “I think the key is the rejection of individualism which I think is central to a humanist view” This tied in neatly with some additional thoughts that I have been mulling over today, so I thought I would blog [...] I really wanted to get the concept of posthumans straight in my head, and the best way to do that is to blog it! Hayles defines the posthuman in the following manner: “First, the posthuman view privileges informational pattern over material instantiation, so that embodiment in a biological substrate is seen as an accident of history rather [...] Reflections on cyborgs, embodiment and cognispheres This week my lifestream reflects the readings I have been doing on Gies, Badmington, Hayles, Shields, and Muri. I have continued with my experiment of copying out into Tumblr passages from my reading on which I wish to reflect. My usual method is to outline writers’ ideas in MindManager – mapping [...] Even though we have come across the idea of information flows between man and machine before, the term ‘cognisphere’ (as quoted in Hayles’ paper) presented it from a different angle for me, and was helpful for me to visualise. It brings it alive and ties everything together- comprised of anything that can process or carry [...] This week was largely devoted to the readings by Dona Haraway (“A Cyborg Manifesto”) and N. Katherine Hayles (“Towards embodied virtuality” and “Unfinished Work: From Cyborg to Cognisphere”) and to philosophical questions on what being posthuman is. I can’t say I became a fan of Haraway; her much-praised (and much-criticised) article now shows its age [...] This week was a very hectic week after my wife’s operation but somehow I got through lots of the readings. After reflecting on Haraway I posted ‘Cyborg Alice’ which portrayed how I think she portrays her cyborg. I found Shields’ comment to be realistic: |
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