This week’s readings were indeed challenging and I find myself still working through Haraway’s “Cyborg Pedagogy” and Hayles’ “Embedded Virtuality” with great enthusiasm, but perhaps with less comprehension. I am making progress in articulating what I feel to be the difference between posthuman and cyborg and will hopefully be able to articulate that in my Lifestream quite soon. As it stands, I am circling it without exactly discerning it. All the hallmarks of the learning process of grappling with a hefty, significant set of texts.
My Lifestream for this week was much more textually based, which perhaps speaks to the complexity of the topic. I suspect when grappling with conceptually challenging logic, we revert to communication channels perceived as being less ambiguous. Interesting phenomena, but one perhaps avoids the daunting cognitive load involved in tackling novel ideas with a novel presentation. Those processes run parallel, but they are unique to be taxing. Hence, the gravitation towards text (and perhaps a lazy nod to it’s authority?).
Also of interest is the fact that all my Lifestream summaries, a summary about a particularly multimodal construct, are in text form. It is as if I am a house divided onto myself. I embrace the challenge of multimodal representation, but not of analysis of that representation.
Those are secondary phenomena; the real focus of this week was the cyborg and posthuman thread, one I look forward to continuing in the next week. I am especially interested in wearable technology and even using the human body as an input device for technology as I believe that represents the natural (not necessarily sensible) progression down that path of merged human and technological possibilities. The following video is just a fun diversion down a dystopian path of dichotomy between humans and technology.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGoi1MSGu64[/youtube]