Day: February 2, 2017

From Youtube: PostHuman: An Introduction to Transhumanism

Transhumanism is a concept mentioned by Bayne (2014) which she claims is often used interchangably with Posthumanism despite being in “radical tension with each other” (p5)

Bayne, S. (2014) What’s the matter with ‘Technology Enhanced Learning’? Learning, Media and Technology, DOI: 10.1080/17439884.2014.915851

From Twitter

This post links to someone deeply involved in the writing, research and seeking solutions around the issues brought up by humanism. I like the practical focus of solutions and ideas, but somehow cautious of what is being sold.

From Twitter: Through experimentation with technology, we bring about our own downfall – a twist in the tail

My reading and viewing activity tonight took me in to a future world which has animal, machine and human merged in near perfect symbiosis. Harroway with animals as kin. But what might happen before we reach the cyborgian/transhuman utopia is that the animals get wise and start to take us out before we get there. The series “Zoo” (linked in the tweet below) offers an entirely different take on sci-fi than what I was expecting. My wife started watching it and told me about, so it seemed relevant to post here as a counterpoint to it all. If transhumanism would have us shake off our tribal instinct, this series sees us amplifying it. Perhaps there is room for sci-fi where it is not the augmented, super human from the future that we’ve to fear, but animals. Oh wait. That’s what Planet of the Apes was about….

Why would anyone write anything if they didn’t intend for their words to change their reader?

I listened to the video below. Certainly it gives a far more digestible account of the writing of Haraway (2007). The youtube content producer Jon Clerk (2014) gives a descriptive account of the article, covering his views on the main themes well. Certainly in more detail than I was initially able to draw out.

I am left wondering though what his thoughts on WHY Harroway wrote the article? What was the point behind creating the article if it was not an attempt to influence the thoughts of others.

The idea that we should embrace our very nature of animal, machine and human makes me wonder if I’ve missed something in Harroway said. If the machine is being programmed with a series of expectations from the cyborg mind. It will not be immune to imperfections of the programmers. There is no steady state implied merely through the act of coding or otherwise instructing a machine. There is genesis, it started somewhere that can be traced. The creation of a cyborg had its roots somewhere that could be called its birth. There is still room for evolution. If the human adapts to its cyborg state, then it could change to become something, but does that change anything. Is it merely that the cyborg has large parts of its human biology removed that makes the ideal for a society that’s free from concern of gender?

 

Clerk, J (2014)  ‘Donna Haraway’s ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’: A Brief Overview’. Youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqglzX_y5wM [online] Accessed: 2nd February.

Hawaray, D. (2000) ‘A cyborg manifesto: Science, technology and social feminist in the late twentieth century’, BELL, D; KENNEDY, B. The Cybercultures reader. London: Routledge, pp. 291-324.

 

A Cyborg Manifesto

It was like a dream. It maybe is. Perhaps I’ll wake up.

I read “A Cyborg Manifesto”. I say read. It was like my eyes were passing over pages, upon endless pages of text with words that for the most part I understood individually, but put together to form something that was in no way shape or form like anything I have read before. I don’t wish to denigrate the author, I wish I could critique the text I read with some sort of cleverness, but I struggle to get a holistic grasp of the article.

I fell asleep. My chair was comfy. The room was warm.

There are bits that I understood, at least, that I was able to take some meaning from. The idea that a cyborg future could befall us all, a sense of inevitability, and what might lead us there, and what might need to change in order to get there. From the feminist perspective of the article, an outline of the world that has so far created the need for feminism to be considered, and some elements of how technology, and writing about technology, has been influenced by male-dominated culture.

That noise. Outside or in. My sleep was ruptured.

I think I’m probably guessing. I feel like I am guessing at the meaning. But the piece also seems to criticise certain aspects of feminism “We do not need a totality in order to work well. The feminist dream of a common language, like all dreams for a perfectly true language, of perfectly faithful naming of experience, is a totalizing and imperialist one. … perhaps ironically, we can learn from our fusions with animals and machines how not to be Man, the embodiement of Western logos.” (pp 51-52).

 

I’m looking forward to the tutorial session tomorrow morning to see what others make of this piece of writing. Meanwhile, I’m off to watch some other people talking about this article to see what I missed e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqglzX_y5wM
Reference:

Hawaray, D. (2007) ‘A cyborg manifesto: Science, technology and social feminist in the late twentieth century’, BELL, D; KENNEDY, B (eds). The Cybercultures reader. London: Routledge, pp. 34-65.