Lifestream summary: week 3
I’ve spent a lot of this week revising and reviewing my lifestream: adding more metadata and reflections based on the readings, our Hangout tutorial and the second Film Festival discussions. As I’ve already mentioned, this process is an interesting one, with the blog allowing for a spiralling* return to ideas and concepts. I did, however, wonder about *your* experience as readers. Will you be willing to return to ‘old’ ground, will you see the additions? Are you a new reader anyway? Or am I simply throwing ideas out into the ether which will never be read…?
This week, I’ve read Haraway and Sterne. Haraway was challenging and I found this YouTube PechaKucha presentation to offer a useful (if not entirely unproblematic) synopsis of her paper. The notion of the cyborg as a metaphor for unity, as a manifestation of a rejection of the dualism of human vs. technology is a rich seam to explore. The cyborg is a ‘complex entanglement’ of the human and the technical; technology is not subservient to the human, nor is it instrumental. The cyborg is a metaphorical rejection of a determinist stance and functions as a conceptual manifestion of the sociomaterial integration of the human and the technical.
I tried to reflect some of these ideas in my visual artefact. I made two false starts on this, trying out a website and a Glogster poster before determining upon Prezi. This in itself was an interesting process: the chosen medium determined how I could present/express my ideas and thus had an impact upon those ideas themselves.
*I’ve been thinking about the connections between this process and Bruner’s spiral curriculum.
Haraway, Donna (2007) A cyborg manifesto from Bell, David; Kennedy, Barbara M (eds), The cybercultures reader pp.34-65, London: Routledge. (e-reserve, pdf)