Posthuman World
Nov 11
Posthuman – not necessarily human, but rather an embodied medium through which critical consciousness is manifested. A narrativised, textualised version of a human (drawing on Hutcheson, 1989). Human denaturalised?
Cyborg – an organism that has both artifical and natural systems. Technology, as artefacts of cultural evolution, comprise material extensions of the material human body (Chislenko, 1997).
Starting out on this, it seems to me the key difference here are the different manifestations of posthuman and cyborg. The two very simple definitions above suggest to me that posthuman is a non-physical manifastation of self. I am human, but I am embodied in a number of different places at any one time. A feat not possible by something simply human. Looking at being human as being a living, breathing, solid object occupying a particular space at a particular time, posthuman suggests to me an expansion of those boundaries. I can exist in many different places at once, with ‘profiles’ taking my place in a number of different arenas. I can occupy physical space at my desk at work, at the same time as occupying a web-space witha group of others discussing e-portfolios. At the same time my non-physical self may also be the subject of interaction with friends through an online social network. I am not physically present in either of the web spaces, but I still have ‘iconic representations’ (Friere, 1970) in these spaces that impact emotionally on others. I no longer have the oppressive state of me as a single unit – I am multipresent. Granted, I am only asynchronous in any of the places I am not currently connected to, but I am not any ‘less there’.
On the other hand, cyborg suggests physical extentions to the human. Wetware enhanced. I am still a singlular example of a human, but my brain capacity is massively enhanced by the systems I use. As the Internet grows, so does my repository of information. As computing power grows, so does my ability to multitask. I don’t need to rely on my own brain for entertaining stimulus. I don’t have to remember everything. The limitations of my physical self are removed through technology. My role is that of operator and manipulator. I need to understand how to use the extensions afforded me by technology and essentially the more tools I learn to use the greater the capability of my cyborg self.
Cyborg and posthuman seem to be linked through critical understanding and everything links back to the single brain inside my skull. Without that neither my posthuman or cyborg selves would have come into existence. A key difference is that after the demise of my brain, assuming my body goes with it, my cyborg self will no longer exist, but my posthuman manifestations will. On the other hand, if my cyborg self is hijacked by, for instance, a team of medical professionals I will still exist in both states, even though my cyborg self is no longer under my control. If I’m dead altogether I can’t be a cyborg, but I can still be posthuman.
I haven’t read Hayles yet, so I’ll off and do that and see what I can add to my argument.
Week Seven Roundup
Nov 9
Bit of a quiet one during the week for my lifestream, but things picked up over the weekend with:
New items tagged in Delicious on e-democracy, William Davies (for his research on e-democracy type issues) and how email drives use further apart and encourages abruptness. Also bloged about this. And 4 tweets on the articels I shared via delicious, cyber activism and automated communities (or rather the process of using software tools to build you a community based on research papers you’ve published). And a link to an article on a Twighlight convention because of the links to online communities manifesting themselves in real-life and there being a parallel there with The 501st Legion, the Flickr group I chose for my VE project.
If you would like to make a comment, please do so here rather than on the wiki.
Tyranny of Technology
Nov 7
Just having a read through this article a friend sent me on Monday. The author talks about the tyranny of technology-mediated communication and cites how much time we lose when we check our emails (it takes 64 seconds to revocer your train of thought after an interruption by email) and how the urgency and immediacy of online communication is causing a breakdown in what can only be termed as politeness (something I am quite keen on). In a recent appraisal I was told that over hte past year I’d become a lot less ‘abrupt’ in my email communications, so maybe I’m a little out of touch with myself in terms of the values I uphold and how I actually behave. But the gist of the comment was that I’d made an improvement, so maybe things aren’t so bad?
Anyway, the point of this blog posting is to make reference to a quote from the end of the article:
| “Usually, if you look behind the technology, you find culture, social behaviour and you find people. Technology is neutral, it depends what you use it for.” Yoram Kalman, a post-doctoral researcher in online communication at the Open University of Israel. |
He seems to be saying that if you have an abrupt way about you, this is mirrored online. You take your social, emotional and cultural baggage with you. That makes me think a bit about ‘telephone voices’ – the phenomena that occurs when people use a different voice to answer the telephone. Maybe this doesn’t happen so much now, now that telephones are pretty much ubiquitous, but I can think of people that do this. People including me, depending who I’m talking to. That’s the ‘it depends what you use it for’ part of what Kalman is saying. If you’re talking to the bank about extending a credit agreement you might present yourself differently (on purpose) than if you’re phoning round some friends to arrange a night out. Likewise if you’ve met someone you rather like, the first time you speak to them will be very different to when you speak to them in six weeks, three months, a years time etc. Might this be similar with online communications? When you’re first contacting people for something (if it’s you that wants something) you may well write differently to if you’ve known them for a while and can drop more and more of the formality out of your requests. And time plays a part in a different way – more specifically lack thereof. You can write a very short response to something simply to get it out of the way.
This happened with one of the people I emailed through Flickr to ask about their involvement in The 501st Legion Flickr group – I wrote a polite request saying what I was doing and why and what I wanted to know. He replied very simply with one sentence answers to my questions. No invitation for follow up. Another respondant was slightly more engaged – he wanted to know why I was asking him questions before he then did pretty much the same thing. Is that out of ’speedy necessity’ or because, as a complete stranger who had approached them, pleasantries were not necessary – after all, it wasn’t like I was going to bump into them in the pub or out walking the dog sometime. It’s highly unlikely I’m ever going to be in any kind of contact with them ever again. So it’s OK to be terse. But in a different setting, such as communication with other members of The Legion, on their own message board (not the Flickr group), they might use more pleasantries. Present themselves differently. But again, they are still not being themselves and are posting under pseudonyms, so perhaps not?
Week Six Roundup
Nov 3
My lifestream this week comprised a number of tweets and delicious posts as I tried to make sense of what I am supposed to do in this virtual ethnography project. And some twitter socialising with other course members. I shared two false starts at where I might conduct my ethnography (not good enough because people were using their real names) and a couple of links to more useful things like Howard Rheingold’s Virtual Communities, another article from Hine whereing she distills her thought on researcher presence, covert ethnography and the ethnographers participation in and understanding of communications and some quotes I picked up from Damien’s blog. And a comment to Henry’s blog which I don’t think he’s approved yet because it still hasn’t appeared in my lifestream. And a comment on Damien’s blog and one on Tony’s.
Picked these up from Damien’s blog, but wanted to store them here for easy access later:
| ‘The concept of culture I espouse is essentially a semiotic one. Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning.’
Geertz, C. ‘Thick description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture’ in ‘Anthropology in Theory’ eds. Moore & Sanders. Blackwell, Oxford, 2006. |
| The point for the ethnographer is not to bring some external criterion for judging whether it is safe to believe what informants say, but rather to come to understand how it is that informants judge authenticity.
Hine, C (2000) The virtual objects of ethnography, chapter 3 of Virtual ethnography. London: Sage. pp41-66 |
More Hine
Oct 27
Found an interesting article by Hine today, where she articulates some of her thoughts arising from her research “exploring uses of information and communications technologies in contemporary scientific reseach”:
| The importance of developing appropriate researcher presence. In a context where the people you are researching have their own web sites, you need one too. It is becoming routine for potential interviewees contacted by email to check out researchers – if you do not offer a link to your home page, then they may well use Google to look for you. Not having online presence can create suspicion, and also mean that you miss out on a chance to deepen discussion of your research.
The limitations of covert ethnography – negotiating consent is about more than just ethical duty. It is easy to do covert research in many kinds of Internet setting. Particularly prominent are mailing lists and newsgroups, where researchers can collect data without telling anyone what they are doing. The ethics of this practice are hotly debated. I have found that contacting people to ask for permission to quote their words is much more than simply a chore undertaken to satisfy ethical demands. It can be a very valuable route to an enhanced research experience. Making the kind of direct contact that asking permission requires means that you learn more about the contexts in which the words we see online are produced and consumed. The importance of participating in and understanding a communication ecology. It is a mistake to think that particular technologies or communications media necessarily map on to socially meaningful research questions. Instead of setting out to research a particular medium it is often helpful to learn something about the various choices of medium available to the people who are at the heart of the research project, and aim to participate in appropriate ways within that existing ecology. |
Article is available from here.
Week Five Roundup
Oct 26
Posted to my lifestream this week were:
6 photos shared via Flickr (to do with workplace transliteracy and desk artefacts – also blogged about this)
2 articles saved to deli.icio.us (one on memes, one on facebook cutting student drop-out rates)
Comments on my own visual artefact and one on Bill’s
2 blog postings – Lifeworlds / Workplace Transliteracy and Virtual Ethnography and Twitter
2 tweets about virtual ethnography, one signposting my blog posting on the same topic
Work here has mainly centred around the virtual ethnography project –something I’m still struggling to get to grips with……
Whilst reading Hind I’m also checking my friend’s FB updates on the demonstration happening at Wood Lane ahead of Nick Griffin’s participation in Question Time tonight. She has travelled there to be ‘in the field’. I have not. I’m aware the updates I am reading could well be influenced by my friend’s political, social and cultural standpoint but she is gaining the insights she is posting from observing at close quarters and interacting with others at the demonstration.
If updates were being posted by a group of people all at the same demonstration, perhaps via Twitter as was the case with the G20 demonstrations earlier this year, do they form enough of a community to observe and interact with for virtual ethnography? The community is loosely formed and, in the case of posting to Twitter with a particular hashtag, temporal (although other longer lasting networks of communities may exist within and without the Twitter-posting community). The demonstraters are gaining insights from seeing and doing – I am gaining insights from their postings.
With regard to the language of the community, something that strikes me with virtual ethnography is that the language used, particularly in the case of Twitter. The language may well be influenced by text-speak in order to meet the 140 character limit. In some ways this could be perceived as a distortion of the regular language fo the community. How then is it possible to become immersed in the language of the community?
Following the #bbc and #griffin hashtags gains me admission to the community as an observer (I didn’t have to negotiate access) – but as I’m not there can I really communicate with the participants in any real kind of way? Can one conduct virtual ethnography on a group of people who are doing something in real life but reporting it virtually? Does this make one more of a casual observer?