Fembots, Latex, Haraway and Hayles

This entry is cross-posted from the University of Edinburgh's 'Digital Cultures' course, a part of the MsC in e-learning.

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 rather quiet of late - this last two weeks - partially because Modern Warfare 2 arrived (disrupting nearly everything in my life) but largely because (and I have to be honest here) I found the Harway and Hayles readings quite alienating. As I've said before on this course, I struggle badly with certain types of language used by academics in this field and have wondered if that language and those accompanying narrative structures wouldn't be worthy of a mini-ethnography itself.

Going back to Hine's assertion that the job of the virtual ethnographer is to discover how our informants create 'truth', I can't help but (somewhat snidely) observe that for many in this field 'truth' seems to be created by use of an elitist, hyper-real vocabulary. Whilst such pointedly playful language is perhaps part of the point which Harway and Hayles are trying to make, there were moments when (with Haraway in particular) some of the writing seemed like an exercise in linguistic masturabtion. Although, I'm aware that that probably says as much about me as it does Professor Haraway.

All of that said, I appreciate that such things shouldn't discourage me from course participation, but rather spur me on to try to form a greater understanding. To that end, I'll try to work my way through the five discussion questions which Sian and Jen posed to help us work through these readings.

1. What is the difference between being a cyborg and being posthuman?

The short answer: I really don't know. But some ideas did slosh around in my head whilst reading these pieces: perhaps Haraway's cyborg is a celebration of the fusion of man and machine, a position which revels in the ambiguity caused by the union of organic and artificial. By contrast, Hayles' identification of the narrative of 'the posthuman' seems to be something else - where the materiality of the human condition seems to be considered a design flaw of evolution; something which we may soon be in a position to rectify with unspecified, unknown technologies which allow human consciousness (now reduced to a mere mathematical equation for the storage of information) to be 'downloaded' and 'uploaded' into another physical host.

My first thoughts ran to Warren Ellis' Spider Jerusalem stories (the Transmetropolitan series), in which one of the stories showcases a future technology where humans download themselves into a cloud of particles - unshackling themselves from the limits of their bodies. Naturally, I also found myself thinking of James Cameron's forthcoming 'Avatar' - in which a wheelchair-bound war veteran is offered the chance to download into the engineered body of an alien (an eight-foot smurf by the looks of it) in order to... oh, who cares why? The whole thing seems an excuse to showcase some nifty new 3D technology, but the same notion of humans as 'downloadable content' seems to pervade here - as though corporeal existence is simply an irrelevance and we are destined to be reduced to nothing more than a DNA driven RSS feed.

2. Is our thinking about – and beyond – cyberculture still too structured by the kinds of binaries Haraway critiques (promise/threat, for example, or utopia/dystopia)? How does Haraway’s cyborg myth disrupt these?

Again, I just don't know. I do certainly see some of the binaries which the questions suggests in operation every day: debates around 'real' friends and 'online friends', virtual and real, actual and imaginary, corporeal and data-based information and the endless online firestorm over authentication of information as 'real' or 'false' (see Wikipedias' ever-present problems).

But, speaking with friends, family and colleagues I think that the 'utopian/dystopian' binary of the web is rather reductive. People who have serious grievances with social networks like Facebook (over issues of authenticity of interaction, stalking, bullying and privacy) are still using it - no matter how much they may profess they dislike it. If their view of such technologies and the resulting interactions were that dystopian, I don't believe they would engage as they do.

I'm not all that sure that Haraways' Cyborg does actually disrupt these binaries all that much. I know that it's hardly scientific, but I find myself looking (again) at the narratives, stereotypes and presentations of cyborgs within contemporary science-fiction and feel that not all that much has changed. Star Trek: Voyager's latex-clad, baloon-breasted 'Seven of Nine' character seemed like nothing more than a fairly routine geek-boy fantasy - all curves, doe-eyed, kittenish misunderstandings about sexuality, arched eyebrows and the ever-present threat of repressed sexual desire exploding out of its spandex jumpsuit to consume the nearest unsuspecting male crew member. Although not a cyborg per-se, the next Star Trek show (Enterprise) replicated the formula with the charecter T'Pol - a similarly Lara Croft-shaped Vulcan crew-member, whose detached, unemotional behaviour made her seem like nothing more than 'Seven of Nine 2.0'.

A more recent example might be Summer Glau's portrayal of a female Terminator in 'The Sarah Connor Chronicles' (pictured above) - a behaviourally submissive, lethally dangerous killerbot sent through time to protect the male hero, whose duties seem to involve brutally murdering people whilst looking sexually suggestive and wanton. It's not the first time Glau has done this either - her portrayal of River Tam in the fan-favourite 'Firefly' was remarkably similar in places: a precociously talented young woman, fiddled with by nefarious government scientists whose intention was to use technology to turn her into a lethal killing machine - placing a murdering automata in the body of a hot teenage girl. And let's not stop there - Joss Whedon's latest offering, The Dollhouse, sees an array of interchangeable models posing as empty-headed government assasins - their minds a series of blank slates awaiting downloading of new orders to murder assorted bods whilst looking like they're posing for the cover of Vanity Fair.

If Haraways' cyborg was an attempt to break-down standard male-authored sexual fantasies, gender narratives and older, more rigid binary constructions of sexuality, it has been, in the field of mainstream sci-fi anyway, a manifest failure.

3. Is Cartesian mind/body dualism, as Hayles argues of posthuman embodiment (p5), the ultimate opposition that structures all of our debates about subjectivity and online identity?

I'm not that convinced that the Cartesian duality referred to in the question is the ultimate opposition, but it is one which I see debated and enacted almost every day. The seeming paranoia which sat at the heart of James Harkins' 'Cyburbia' seemed to stem from the linking of human beings to a 'feedback loop' - in which virtual comunication becomes an exercise as addictive as the most powerful drug, leading to the illusion of 'friendship', authenticity and meaningful interaction. Social networking's detractors, it seems, suggest that there is an inherent artificiality about such interactions - that the lack of embodied discourse renders the interactions trivial, meaningless and devoid of substance. 'Friends' in Facebook, this narrative suggests, are not real friends at all. But why? Because data sent down a optic cable cannot carry the same meaning, the same nuance and same 'authenticity' as an exchage of data between two people in the same room.

4. What other connections might there be between cyborg theory and the pragmatics of online pedagogy and course design?

Placeholder answer: I don't know. Sorry! I appreciate that this is probably the most crucial of the five questions, and a short answer declaring my ignorance is less than ideal, but I'm being as honest as I can. I've just failed to see the obvious connection between these readings and the design of e-learning materials. And I'd very much like to know what they are.

5. Do cyborgs really resist the structure of sex/gender, as Haraway claims?

In short, no. I don't think that they do. I shan't repeat my earlier assertions about female cyborgs in current sci-fi shows except to say that it seems as though many are merely play-things for male writers - blank slates upon which rating-gathering, hyper-sexualised, yet emotionally dead female archtypes are projected. Rather than resisting, usurping or inverting structures of gender, it would seem that cyborgs perpetuate certain archetypal fantasies, and may, in fact, lead to even more stereotyped depictions of gender and sexuality - a body without a brain, a set of curves to be observed without guilt or conscience because, after all, she's 'only a machine'.

Is Google Knol making a comeback?

When initially launched, Google's Knol (the seeming competitor to Wikipedia) was widely dismissed as a flawed concept - placing the experts back at the top of the knowledge-creation food chain, in contrast to the more open and all together 'democratic' Wikipedia. That was then. Now, well, things seem to be a little different. From the Guardian Technology section:

Wikipedia editors seem to be dropping like flies, according to research by Felipe Ortega, from the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid. He analysed Wikipedia's data on the editing histories of its more than three million active contributors in 10 languages and found that "in the first three months of 2009, the English-language Wikipedia suffered a net loss of more than 49,000 editors, compared to a net loss of 4,900 during the same period a year earlier," reports The Wall Street Journal.

But why? Hard to say, but a constant theme in the comments below (and that I've read elsewhere this last 6-12 months) is that many Wikipedians are leaving citing abusive, power-mad editors.

And many of them have jumped ship and gone over to Knol. From the comments section below the main article:

For two years, I maintained an important contemporary dental and oral surgery topic after heavy research, writing and editing to establish the all-important standard of care. I am a tech journalist with ample experience and training.

Suddenly the topic was dumbed down, removing long-standing authoritative referenced content critical for patient safety. It seemed to me as if some malpractice insurance carrier was suddenly editing the material, doing serious damage to the safety aspects as if worried that someone might wave the Wikipedia article from the witness box in front of a jury. Oh, Wikipedia says xyz is the standard of care. Since the surgeon did not use xyz, let's give a $M to the plaintiff.

I made repeated attempts to restore the content but it was always returned to the dumbed-down state. Somebody with a paycheck was watching. Disgusted, I jumped ship, rewriting and posting the content at Google Knol and at Scribd.com where no one but me can touch it.

Knol is very cool from a content management standpoint. My work has earned very high marks and I have now been invited to post at MedPedia (and I am working on it). Thousands have read the articles and many have downloaded. I am delighted because the safety issues are critical.

Is Knol for you? Give it a tumble, ask the top rated writers (many Wikipedia refugees, like me) for help. And have some fun with the low end stuff. Knol is a very liberal experience. www.knol.google.com.

Blather, Rinse, Repeat: An Ethnography of Conspiracy Theory

'Blather, Rinse, Repeat: An Ethnograpy of Conspiracy Theory' [A Prezi Scrapbook]

I don't know how I get myself into these things, but I'm doing a talk on Saturday 7th November at the Dublin Paracon 2009, at the Radisson Blu Royal Hotel, Golden Lane, Dublin 8. I've wanted to try out Prezi for a while and thought this might be a good chance to muck about with it. This is a 'Prezi scrapbook' which will eventually become the basis of the talk. It also overlaps with some of my university work at the moment.

Wonderful when two previously completely un-related fields you move about it wander together. Suggest you go full screen to see it properly. Press play first.

Field Sites, UFOs and Virtual Pith Helmets

This entry is cross-posted from the University of Edinburgh's 'Digital Cultures' course, a part of the MsC in e-learning.

I've been having a ball this last few days, as our focus moves into Block 2: Communities and our working towards a 'virtual ethnography'. I haven't quite decided what community to look at just yet (I'm leaning towards a study of the community of people around the 9/11 Conspiracy Theories) but getting up to speed on the various ideas surrounding notions of 'virtual ethnography' or 'netnography' as some prefer, has allowed me to indulge in a long-held notion I've had about myself 'being an ethnographer'.

I studied Anthropology for a year at university - finally opting to focus on English and Classics for degree level - but I've always harboured fantasies about myself returning to the subject in some unspecified, undefined capacity in the future. I'm not claiming I'm there yet, but the reading lists for this block and some rummaging on the web have brought back some familar ideas and names: Bronisław Malinowski, Margaret Mead, E. E. Evans-Pritchard et al.

But then, I thought to myself, have I actually been doing this along? Have I actually been conducting virtual ethnography the whole time? Since 2001, I've been contributing to an Irish site, www.blather.net, where 'fortean phenomena' are catalogued, ranted about and studied with a jaundiced, satirical eye. We've been doing so since 1997 and have embedded ourselves into a rather strange interweb culture of conspiracy theorists, UFOlogists, Cryptozooologists and general random lunacy.

I hasten to add by the way that there our stated position is that we don't believe in UFOs and aliens. And we're not so sure that they believe in us either.

Or to put it another way, I'm not as interested in finding UFOs so much as I am in finding stories about UFOs.

An example is this 'Map of the Weird' which we put together a while back, location marking many of the stories which we've blogged about over the years.

This is a video version of the tour.



So, it's with some giddy excitement that I now find myself in the hilarious position of being able to academically justify my years and years of trawling the bowels of the internet for the detritus and wreckage of conspiracy theory, alien abductions and frog falls. Who knew?

All joking aside, there's some serious questions to be answered before I can really go any further:

• What (if anything) is my 'field site'?


• Am I a 'lurker' ethnographer or one that directly partcipates in the community?


• How do I reference, present and quote sources?


• What 'netiquette' considerations do we have be aware of?

I may not need a pith helmet so much as a tin-foil hat, but here we go...

Second Life Ethnography

Policing 2.0 NPIA Conference

What's that ghoul doing?