Section 1: Cyberbodies

1. Section 1: Cyberbodies Steph Kittell, Lindsey Nicholls, Randy Horton

2. TECHNOCRITICISM AND THE MATERIAL BODY • Technology is not neutral • Technology is not “autonomous” because it is embedded in social process • Technology can be a metaphorical term or a concrete one • McLuhan: “the media serve to extend our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned” • The human BODY – by use of tools and technologies – has multiplied its strength and increased its capacities to extend itself over space and time

3. TECHNOCRITICISM AND THE MATERIAL BODY • Technology as a PROSTHESIS of the human body • FREUD: “with every tool man is perfecting his own organs, whether motor or sensory, or is removing the limits of their functioning” • HUMAN BEINGS become a kind of prosthetic GOD • Biotechnology: technologies that are “unseen” • BIOTECHNOLOGICAL REVOLUTION is more significant and far-reaching than communications technology

4. TECHNOCRITICISM AND THE MATERIAL BODY • ISSUES surrounding biotechnology: • Breakdown of “natural law” • Issues with medicine: PRIVATE personal matter or PUBLIC debate/policy? • Debate about biotechnology did not find an academic niche in the American university of 1970 • Most results were associated with women  motherhood, children, care-giving • FEMINISTS: (on issues of biotechnology) focus on issues of GENDER and technology of REPRODUCTION (not production)

5. TECHNOCRITICISM AND THE MATERIAL BODY • ISSUES OF AGEING: • Desire for longevity results in the obliteration of the body of the species • With sex change operations becoming common, what about the possibility of age-change operations? • AGEING as organic realm. And SOCIAL PROCESS • Term OLD is transferable from organic realm to technological realm, but the term YOUNG is not • AGE RELATIONS ARE POWER RELATIONS

6. TECHNOCRITICISM AND THE MATERIAL BODY • ISSUES OF AGING (continued) • The younger generation would prefer the older generation stay where they are—to stay older than they themselves are: a matter of power • The term FUTURE connotes progress, but the term OLD connotes decline, diminishment and disease • Focus on detaching biological roles and sequences from social roles, such as parenting, when it allows for increased opportunities to fulfill those roles • Ultimate technological fantasy: creation without mother • Male fantasy: to make older women unnecessary • Technological culture is a youth culture

7. TECHNOCRITICISM AND THE MATERIAL BODY http://www.worldhealth.net/

8. CYBERLOVE

9. Cyberlove : Creating Romantic Relationships on the Net • Can people fall in love on the internet? • Cyberlove can be positive and negative • Positive: learning about there personality, and maybe falling in love with there personalities rather then just there looks. • Negative things consists of the problems of peadophillia and the safety of talking to a stranger. There have been a number of cases, of where children have gone to meet someone they met online and never come back. • “During the last 10 years, it has become more and more common to create relationships on the Internet”. This is not just in chat rooms but also in online dating sites such www.datingdirect.com. • - When I was on MSN messenger talking to people, I put my username as, “Has anyone met someone online (chat room/instant messenger), and then met them face2face? please contact me!” • My dad went onto a site like www.datingdirect.com to meet his current partner, so it is not uncommon now for people to do so.

10. Cyberlove : Creating Romantic Relationships on the Net Lindsey wrote a questionnaire for people I knew to fill out about there experiences with Cyber love. Some of the answers were very interesting. I asked 2 males and 1 female. • 1. What chat room or online place did you meet in? • 2. Were you in love before you met in person? • 3. Was it weird talking to him/her on the phone for the first time? • 4. Did you have any expectations of him/her before talking on the phone/ or meeting for that matter? • 5. Were you pleased with what you saw? • 6. Did their personality match their looks? • 7. Were you worried about meeting them at all? • 8. Did you talk to him/her on the phone hoping that it might lead to something? • 9. Did you start a conversation in the chat room, initially to find a boyfriend/girlfriend? • 10. Were you worried about the distance, and making it work? • 11. What was his/her username? • 12.Is that one of the reasons you started talking? • 13.What was your username? • 14. Why did you choose this name? • 15. What was the first thing you remember saying to him/her? • 16. How long did you know each other before you met face-to-face? • 17. How long did you know each other before you spoke on the phone? • 18. Would you go back on a chatroom again in attention of finding a partner?

11. Cyberlove : Creating Romantic Relationships on the Net Respondents • 2 of them met there partners through instant messenger, through someone else. 1 met them in a Lord of The Rings chatroom, a keen interest. • - All 3 of the people who filled in this questionnaire believed that they were not necessarily in love. 1 believed they were in lust not love, 1 thought they were on the way, and the other one thought he cared for her and loved her but was not “in love” with her. • - When I was younger I met someone on holiday, two years later we spoke to each other online. Then started talking on the phone. When I spoke on the phone with this person I was expecting someone so different then the person I spoke too. • - 2 of the people I asked said they were expecting something, whether it was an accent or something else, one of them had a pretty good idea of what they would sound like. This shows that if you know someone well before you talk you still expect something but you have a rough idea of what it is going to be. • - Everyone seemed pleased with who they saw. “Meeting in person was purely about having the ability to be with each other in person, go somewhere together, spend a day together.” • - None of them spoke on the phone to lead any further.

12. Cyberlove : Creating Romantic Relationships on the Net Respondents (continued) • - None of them meant to start the conversation to find a partner. One of the people I asked did not really like the person they were talking to at first and one of them (a male) thought that he was talking to a male, and did for about 5 months. They just talked because they had similar interests. • - none of them started talking because of the username, like it said in one of the articles. • - none of them remember what they said to each other at first, how they first started talking. In Cyberlove : creating romantic relationships on the net it says “none of the informants remembered how they first started to talk with the person”. It seems this is common. • - one person started talking in December, and met up the following October so 10 months. Another one was about a year. And the other was a couple months • - The one who met after 10 months started talking after 6months. The one who met about a year was also 6 months, and the one who was a couple months was 1 month. • - It seems that being online is a longer process then going to a bar, going for a date. It seems that online you find out about there personality then there voice then their looks. Whereas when you meet someone in a bar you are thrown in the deep end and you have to get to know all the aspects at once. • - None of the people I asked said they would go online to find someone, it was all accidental. • - You could be talking to someone online, who you see everyday of your life (they could be the person who sells you the paper everyday), who on an ordinary day you would say no more then Good Morning to in usual circumstances.

13. Cyberlove : Creating Romantic Relationships on the Net • You’ve Got Mail is a good example of meeting people online. It’s about to characters who start chatting and decide to finally meet. Up until they meet they do not use specifics, such as where they live or names of people they know, or where they work, but they do know what each other are interested in. • In You’ve Got Mail when the characters meet, the person who turns up to meet the women is her worst enemy, the person who is taking her customers away from her store. She doesn’t realise that this is the person who is meant to be meeting her, she thinks he is just there to annoy her and she wasn’t expecting this nasty man to be the man who she gets on so well online. He plays along with it, because he knows that she wasn’t expecting him, he was not expecting her, because online they go on well whereas offline they do not.

14. Cyberlove : Creating Romantic Relationships on the Net • In Sandy Stone’s article The Cross-Dressing Psychiatrist is an example of trusting someone who is not actually who you think it is. Is this unethical or ethical? He/she did help people but he did it in the wrong way. • Unlike the women in this chat room, they trusted someone who was not who they thought was a good friend helping them get through there problems, children are more vulnerable to seeing flaws in stories and therefore to paedophilia. • There have been many cases. A recent case in Britain is that of a girl aged 17 who may have gone to meet an online person and ended up murdered. She was found 500 yards from her house. http://news.scotsman.com/topics.cfm?tid=746&id=583622005. • Due to cases like the above, precautions have been taken. On msn messenger this is always at the top of the page.

15. Cyberlove : Creating Romantic Relationships on the Net

16. Cyberlove : Creating Romantic Relationships on the Net • In Sandy Stone’s article The Cross-Dressing Psychiatrist is an example of trusting someone who is not actually who you think it is. Is this unethical or ethical? He/she did help people but he did it in the wrong way. • Unlike the women in this chat room, they trusted someone who was not who they thought was a good friend helping them get through there problems, children are more vulnerable to seeing flaws in stories and therefore to paedophilia. • There have been many cases. A recent case in Britain is that of a girl aged 17 who may have gone to meet an online person and ended up murdered. She was found 500 yards from her house. http://news.scotsman.com/topics.cfm?tid=746&id=583622005. • Due to cases like the above, precautions have been taken. On msn messenger this is always at the top of the page.

17. The Cyborg Manifesto • “A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction.” • “Modern medicine is also full of cyborgs, of couplings between organism and machine, each conceived as coded devices, in an intimacy and with a power that was not generated in the history of sexuality.” • “It is also an effort to contribute to socialist-feminist culture and theory in a postmodernis, non-naturalist mode and in the utopian tradition of imagining a world without gender, which is perhaps a world without genesis, but maybe also a world without end.”

18. The Cyborg Manifesto • “The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian and completely without innocence.” • “So my cyborg myth is about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities which progressive people might explore as one part of needed political work..” • “Another of my premises is that the need for unity of people trying to resist world-wide intensification of domination has never been more acute.” • “…a cyborg world is about the final imposition of a grid of control on the planet… …From another perspective a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints.

19. The Cyborg Manifesto • “Cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves… …It means both building and destroying machines, identities, categories, relationships, space stories… … I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.”

20. The Cross Dressing Psychiatrist • A real-world example of some of Donna Haraway’s arguments • Deconstruction/reconstruction of our bodies, personalities, and gender. • Transcending borders through technology • Comment on patriarc control of technology • Psychology as a scientific method to understand or explain thought patterns or “coded messages”

21. The Cross Dressing Psychiatrist • Further example of concepts in earlier readings • Embodiment of textual space. • Questions the validity of “real space” vs. “cyber-space” • Comment on trust and relationships as outlined in “Cyberlove” • Special note: “social rules do not necessarily map across the interface between the physical and virtual worlds”

22. Section 1: Cyberbodies Lindsey Nicholls Steph Kittlell Randy Horton