The second week of my Lifestream is illustrative of my general predilections as a learner and film consumer. During this week #ededc explored the notion of posthuman through several films attempting to address the question of what it means to be human. A heady question indeed and one that I will not attempt to answer here. What I will attempt to do is address what I feel to be the dominant narratives found in these stories.

However, as a budding researcher and ethnographer of digital culture, I should come clean with my biases. I am not, nor have ever, been an incredibly enthusiastic science fiction fan. While I enjoy a creative take on what shape the future may take, I have never been completely enthralled by the conclusions, many of which seem formulaic to me. My Lifestream this week should serve to illustrate my resistance to dystopian presentations of the future, not due to their impossibility, but mostly due to their incompleteness (in my opinion). Generally, this resistance (however futile) falls under a few points, which I will outline below.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JD6gOrARk4[/youtube]

(I enjoy the above not only for the poetics, but also because Hamlet is the ultimate cyberpunk, simply desiring to tear the entire machine apart and then shuffle off this mortal coil, plagued by memories, acutely aware of the fragility of humanness, a good metaphor for the hacker narrative in digital culture.)

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVoNm7rqaEc[/youtube]

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