This week I’ve been discovering a few new ideas for myself:
1. I’ve still been looking at some of the ethnographies. The great variety of these seem to show up some facts about the internet that we had been dealing with from the start: The virtual communities have utopian elements (such as bringing people together who share the same interestes; or for being sites of communication for action groups or groups with the same hobbies; for being a place to share your problems; for sharing and developing knowledge). But they also have dystopian elements (friendship or community might be offered under false pretensions such as trying to lure you somewhere or for trying to get commercial information; identities might be false and messages invented; people might disinterested in one another). All these elements would also exist in real life communities but the virtual world does make it easier to form wider networks.
2. Two different strands of looking at our new relationship to technology seem to be emerging. On the one hand we have Haraway’s theory of a new cyborg being, a new variant of humankind striving towards disembodiment. On the other hand Gies is saying that cyberselves merely offer a new layer to our identities. Hayles seems to be somewhere in the middle as she argues that we are still embodied but our cognition has changed and is now far more networked.
3. I think it doesn’t really matter which perception we have – whether we totally identify with technology and feel like a cyborg, or whether we are just using technology to supplement our life. The question is really how to use technology in a way that gives us fulfilment and helps us to live and learn. Shields text “Flanerie for Cyborgs” identifies this need to bridge the different levels of technology and real life. As far as I understand, this text is highlighting the position of the Cyborg between the two states.
4. As teachers and students we are constantly juggling between real life and technology. We are constantly entwined between the two and we need to make use of both. For me as a teacher I want to reach my students on as many levels as possible and this means to acknowledge their digital worlds and needs as well as their real life worlds and needs. In the end we are always dealing with embodied people and we use technology to reach them better. Are we offering them the right balance, or too much technology or too little? How much technology actually helps them to learn, and how much of a distraction is it? Do they easily get distracted when learning on the computer? These are also things worth investigating.
Gies, L. (2008). How material are cyberbodies? Broadband Internet and embodied subjectivity. Crime Media Culture 4/3.
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
Hayles, N.K. (2006). Unfinished Work: From Cyborg to Cognisphere. Theory Culture Society, 23/7-8.
Shields, R. (2006). Flânerie for Cyborgs. Theory Culture Society, 23/7-8.