Damien's E-learning and Digital Cultures Blog

Week 10 saw me finally get the guts up to try to blog about Haraway, but also to spend a little bit more time looking at what Hayles had been saying – and my lifestream has been a little more reflectve of this. I was specifically struck by this talk, which I spent a fair bit of time mulling over:

This talk, in combination with the core reading, opened a few new doors up for me. Specifically Hayles’ focus on issues of embodiment. This has a personal resonance for me as I’ve had  several conversations with people about this issue. Also, I was struck by Hayles’ suggestion that certain futurists see humans as data-sets ‘trapped’ inside bodies – as though we are no more than RSS feeds awaiting liberation from a ‘walled garden’. I found myself nodding along with great chunks of what she says.

Moving on (or catching up) I started immersing myself in Cyborg pedagogies and thinking about how this shaped my participation on this course, the impact it may have had on my own professional work and what connections there may have been to the work I’d been doing on conspiracy theories – notably 9/11.

An uncanny digital pedagogy concerned with ghostliness of place would take a confident stance toward its own ‘otherness’, using the multiple, dissagregated and public nodes of the read- write web as place to conduct its business.

I like this notion – not least because (and I think I said this before) the fractured nature of my own online presence has been occasionally disquieting. Is it really wise to be leaving chunks of myself littered across the web like I do? A half-finished Bebo page here, a un-finished blog over there and a thousand micro-blogging posts in between. Is this ‘healthy’? Is this behaviour that may come back to haunt me? Should I be worried at all?

A ‘Cyborg Pedagogy’ resolves many of these questions, shifting the argument away from concerns about fractured presence towards a condition where I revel in the broken, disaggregated nature of my own online presence. It is worth noting though, that the lifestream tool is crucial here – in that it helps me ‘re-aggregate myself’ – enabling revision of materials and the construction of something approaching a ‘narrative’ of what I’ve been doing.

I started week 9 reasonably well (adding more Haraway related videos from Youtube) but found myself petering out again as I struggled to come to terms with the Cyborg Manifesto. Perhaps, feeling like I was lost in words, I found myself turning back to the visual and rummaging around in visual representations of the cyborg. As a seasoned – and recovering-  Star Trek fan (one who remembers the bad old days before J.J. Abrams) I naturally found myself thinking of the Borg, Seven of Nine and the myriad other cybernetic fantasies which the Hollywood types churn out for us and found myself asking if these depictions told us anything.

Were they reflective (in any way – even in opposition) of Haraway’s work?  My short answer was no, but with further thought it did seem to me that depictions of cyborgs were quite frequently highly sexualised – to the point where I was struck by how at variance they were to Harway’s agenda.

Sci-fi aside, the most compelling depiction of a female cyborg I found was this:

Week 8 has seen me recovering from the virtual ethnography of last week – and mopping up the mess. My lifestream has reflected this, which a continuing stream of 9/11 conspiracy theory related links and videos. I didn’t have time to embed all of the resources into the prezi that I used for the ethnography, so I spent some time getting it in place for future folks to spend time clicking about in.

Moving onwards, I’ve started to try to engage with the shift to Haraway and Hayles’ work – struggling rather a lot with Haraway in particular. As is usual in these circumstances I turn to Youtube (and others) to see what video materials I can find for (I hope) student-created work which might help help me overcome the feeling that I’m drowning in Harway’s language. I found a few useful videos to help me, but also a few quite pointedly satirising her work.

Week 7 has seen me delving further into the field site that I started defining last week – the 9/11 conspiracy theories. In watching these I have been attempting to do two primary things:

1. Indentify the ‘digital winks’ that I mentioned before
2. Identify the method(s) by which the 9/11 conspiracy theory movement arrive at shared ‘truth’ or ‘authentcity’

Specifically I have found myself watching clips from two key ‘eyewitnesses’ to the events of 9/11 – Barry Jennings and Wally Miller – both of whom have been quoted xtensively by the Truthers and both of whom objected to their misquotation and depiction in the 9/11 narratives.

These two examples will form the core of my virtual ethnography and represent the focus of this week’s lifestream.

This week has seen me collating links, videos, blog pages, conversations and a plethora of ideas for my notional ‘Map of the Internet’. As previously discussed, this map will include three notional towns ‘Cyburbia’, Cyberia, and ‘Deadwood’ – the latter a lawless, wild-west like area where we find communities like 4chan, Anonymous and an army of hacktivists.

To these three towns I may add a fourth – ‘Disturbia’, a place for conspiracy theories, investigative blogging, alternative history and guerilla film-making. But I’ll save the details on that until I get to Block 2 and my virtual ethnography…

I’m behind already! Having lost four days this last two weeks to the flu (I got sick twice) this blog is coming a bit late. Apologies.

The week 2 film festival was highly thought-provoking, with a further exploration of some of themes I’d noticed occuring during week 1. Notably, the blue pill/red pill scene from The Matrix really struck home. Issues of choice, freedom, slavery and emancipation seemed to come to the fore for me.

I’d blogged last week about the notional towns of ‘Cyberia’ and ‘Cyburbia’: the former a world of infinite possibility and adventure – a space in which to re-create ‘reality’ – and the latter an altogether more sinister place, of virtual voyeurism and ‘control’ by the machine.

Elephant’s Dream, Tears in the Rain and others also seemed to touch on these themes, but perhaps from other angles: machines with thoughts, machines with feelings, abandoned and discarded as soon as they have fulfilled their alloted tasks. The scene from AI also seemed to nudge into this fearful concern we have:  a sense of guilt that we have about the machines we build to service us, and the all too tantalising possibility that these machines will become as ‘real’ as those that they serve.

What is this need we have that is reflected in our science fiction novels and movies? Why do we almost crave stories about sentient machines? Machines that feel, cry, fear and despair as badly as we do.  Are our own fears simply being projected on to these blank silicon slates? Or are these stories speaking to a bigger fear again – that the systems we create to serve us may actually enslave us?

I don’t have any immediate answers, but I can’t help but be struck by the similarities in theme across such a wide spectrum of sci-fi works. From HAL 9000, to Philip K. Dicks Replicants, Star Trek’s Data and on to Kubricks’ discarded childbot, we seem to revel in the predicaments of such creatures – lost in the woods, looking for their makers, struggling by in a universe where there seems to be no answers, but more and more questions.

I’ve heard it suggested that a lot can be learnt from science-fiction – in that these stories are (consciously or unconsciously) projections of our own current fears, dreams and aspirations. Perhaps in the same way that H.G. Wells’ ‘The War of the Worlds’ now seems like a frighteningly prescient vision of the horrors of the first and second world wars (see video below), our modern sci-fi luminaries (Philip K. Dick, Kurt Vonnegut, William Gibson) may be doing more than predicting a fanciful future – they may be depicting it and creating it as they write – allowing new realities to be ’storied into existence’.