We Are All Cyborgs Now

"In this new regime, a train station (like an airport, a café, or a park) is no longer a communal space but a place of social collection: people come together but do not speak to each other. Each is tethered to a mobile device and to the people and places to which that device serves as a portal. I grew up in Brooklyn..."

Wait a minute.

Steve Rogers, did you write my digital media textbook? O_o

The above photo is a still of the Captain America deleted scenes from The Avengers (2012). Just a kid from 1920s Brooklyn, Steve has been transported into a future where nobody really talks to anybody. Everyone is plugged into a device of some sort designed to take them out of their immediate surroundings. From left to right we have an MP3 player, an eReader, and two smartphones. Steve Rogers, the man out of time, is the only one actually on the train.

Earlier in the clip, when Steve is walking through New York, a cellphone street vendor barks out "Buy some time! Buy some time!"



Is that what we're all doing now? Trying to "make more time by multitasking, our twenty-first-century alchemy" at the expense of living in the moment? I know of one person in particular that is notorious for this type of behavior. I'll have her over at my house, and she will interact with her cellphone every five seconds while we're eating. Trying to have a conversation with her feels like I'm intruding upon the world she really wants to be in. Even my best friend is slipping into this habit now that she has a smartphone. I have to cover up the screen to get her to answer a simple yes or no question. My dog even feels the immediate social disconnect caused by technology; just while I was writing this, he pawed at my leg until I picked him up so he could sit in my lap while I type.

With the immediacy of all of our technology, we are not "existing in the moment" as my yoga teacher likes to say. Recently, however, I've made a concerted effort to stop this, to become a better cyborg by knowing when to turn off the display flickering at the edge of my vision so I can fully experience one event. After all, is all of this connectivity really enhancing our lives when we're sort of--but not really--paying attention to five different things? Well, yes and no. Sometimes, like in class, I use technology to look up supplemental information. That's the beautiful side of technology when online you and real life you is working together towards the same goal. Most times, however...

We're doing five disparate things that detract from each other. I'm not saying this is always a bad thing. Entertainment in itself is not an unworthy pursuit. However, this type of technology is not so shiny new anymore, and we need to learn how to put it down in the right situations. After all, that smartphone is not literally sewn to your hand. Part of the obligation of being a consumer is knowing when to cut yourself off so it does not become an addiction. So, just like the liquor ads always tell you, please

Chapter 1 & 2

So, today's blog is prompted by chapters 1 and 2 from the textbook An Introduction to New Media and Cybercultures from my Capstone class in Communication. A major theme of both chapters focuses around discovering how much of ourselves we take into the cyber world with us.

Earlier theories presented in chapter 1 "such as that by Howard Rheingold (1994) celebrate virtual worlds for enabling the user to transcend geography and the body." However, chapter 2 develops a very different stance based upon more recent--and perhaps more realistic and less ideological--theories:

The artifact is the environment through which the audience moves, and the artifact-environment is shaped by this movement of the audience. "Interactivity" is this mutual linkage: the rootedness of the artifact in the audience and the audience-experience being shaped by the artifact. Art forms that depend on cybercultures once again highlight the fact that cyberculture cannot be studied independently of the real and the material.

 Because the cyber world cannot be completely disconnected from our corporeal selves, then, there is a place to discuss the disparate experiences that different genders go through. The hybrid state between human and computer is known as a cyborg, a key staple in cyberpunk fiction. Ironically, though, in the early eras that claimed that virtual reality allowed one to escape the confines of the body, cyberpunk literature reflected the predominantly white male participants of the technological world through the "macho-cyborg" protagonists. Any transcendence for women and minorities, then, would have come from the fact that cyber culture "rarely identifies the 'console cowboy' as 'white male' because it is assumed that white male bodies are the norm." One of my favorite cyberpunk novels Ender's Game from this time in the late eighties to the early nineties even holds true with this assumption of the white male as the active agent in the cyber world.

From this was born a cyberpunk feminist response that: 

...demands a new genre that emphasizes women's experience of high tech. Feminist cyberpunk begins with the assumption that cyberpunk reinforces existing gender inequalities. The genre foregrounds technology in the material conditions of the real world, where control over technology is concentrated in male, capitalist hands and serves the purpose of racialized and gendered exploitation. The woman cyberpunk, when not a part of the underclass, becomes a code for the alien Other. 

However, it seems just as we move away from the assumption that the body can be transcended is actually when we begin to see this happening. The real world and the cyber world impact upon each other simultaneously in that the more women are introduced to cyber culture, the more the technology is opened up to them and the more they participate. For instance, in the early days of the computer even into the 2000's, computers and their career fields were associated predominantly with men. Now, though, my womanly self is tech savvier than 80% of the guys I know--which is saying something as I tend to hang out with some awesomely geeky individuals. Also, a majority of the individuals I tutor in Web Design are women, and I work with technologically empowered women such as the awesome Graphic Artist Elisabeth Shabi.

Furthermore, rather than the contrived cyberpunk feminist movement, female protagonists now appear naturally in cyberpunk literature such as my favorite recent cyberpunk series Uglies by Scott Westerfeld.

If you read the reviews, I haven't seen a person yet that even comments on how the protagonist is female. It's because it just doesn't matter. Women in technology spheres have become so commonplace that the event is just not remarkable--which is exactly as it should be. Rather than shouting out our special snowflakeness by setting up a separate genre for female cyberpunk, a more effective method is just running a silent invasion into the technology that had been dominated by males. Before long, we're there, and they don't know how long ago it was that they just accepted that fact. We didn't announce our plans to take over their cyber world; we just did it and didn't demand special recognition for it.

That's what the cyber culture I live in is about. Yeah, we are inextricably attached to our female bodies, but it's really quite incidental to our participation in cyber communities. It might even be a benefit in terms of hardware as guys burn their junk on the hot underside of laptops all the time...though I suppose boobs can occasionally get in the way of viewing the screen when you're laying down...

Aaaaaaaaand that's where I end this blog for today. Feel free to contemplate how your own bits influence your online life (answer: probably not much).

Purple Hair and More, Coming to a Classroom Near You!

Hello, people I've now known for three years! Assuming you've all picked up amnesia over the break--or that we might have people looking at this blog who don't know me--allow me to once more introduce myself. My name is Angela Harkins. I'm 22 and a senior at Reinhardt University. Next year, I hope to start working towards a Master's degree in Human-Computer interaction at Georgia Tech. Mostly, though, I'm known as the girl with the purple hair.

 This purple hair, to be exact.

In fact, that picture is one of me in Spain where I studied abroad over the summer. As a web designer, I was able to continue doing some work for Cherokee FOCUS, a non-profit located in Holly Springs, Georgia whose website I built and maintain. It is in this way, then, that cyber culture has quite an impact upon my life. Even though I was half a world away, I was able to participate in my workplace culture almost as if I were there in person. 

It's a little bizarre, when you think about it, to realize that cyber culture has developed over the past few decades to the point that I don't have to be physically near anyone in order to participate in a community. I go to work online, I pay my bills online, and I interact socially online. In fact, since most of my interactions occur on the web, most people's mental representation of me is my avatar rather than my actual face.

However, with this new field suddenly open to us, a lot of the major ethical questions of our day are being raised. I recently received an email about a lawsuit against facebook for using personal information of its users in their advertising. Is it okay for them to do this? After all, we did voluntarily give them the information.

What about the problems over at Instagram where they're selling pictures and user information?

Or, more broadly, should the internet come under the control of the United Nations, or are we doing okay on our own?

What about online piracy, the use of online information by police, and the existence of vigilante groups like Anonymous?

We're setting the example that all future generations will follow. In order to make sure we are laying a solid foundation of moral responsibility, we need to understand the cyber culture in which we are participating before making decisions about issues such as those listed above.