All the EDC blog posts

This Wordle visualisation illustrates the strong (anti)feminist connection that come’s through in Donna Haraway’s essay “A Cyborg Manifesto”. Centrally Haraway’s cyborg world seems to be a device for abandonning the dualisms of (wo)man/machine, mind/body etc. The cyborg provides a predominantly individualist perspective that opens up thinking around different possibilities of being in particular through our relationships animals and machines. Haraway also uses the cyborg as a metaphor for exploring how humanity is interconnected and intertwinned with machines/technologies in complex interdependancies. This more holistic perspective starts to look a lot like being posthuman. So what is the difference between being a cyborg and being posthuman? Is it just a different perspective on similar ideas? For example I might consider my context as being coconstructed by technologies that permeate it and social norms aroung their use – the connections I make with other beings through wifi, the internet, the mobile phone network etc. (a posthuman perspective). My identity, who I am, is also is shaped by the technologies I choose to use and how I use them – my phone, my iPad (a cyborg perspective).

The cyborg metaphor helps to dissolve the subject/object perspective of our relationship with technology and thus empowers us. Instead of positioning ourselves as ‘victims’ or acted on by technology, (positions that arguably giving rise to the promise /threat, utopian/distopian binaries), we have through the cyborg myth, been given agency to imagine/coconstruct less polarised futures.

I have just watched a recording of Ten Paradoxes of Technology. He seems to be espousing a posthumanist perspective of technology and uses these ten paradoxes to illustrate how we are often blinded to the interdependance of the human and the technological.
Here are his paradoxes and a few notes about the connection with posthumanism.
1. The paradox of the parts and the whole
Feenberg argues that technological artefacts make no sense separated into their component parts. A tyre makes no sense unless it is part of a car, a screen only has meaning if it is viewed in relation to the whole device – mobile phone, iPad, television etc. He sees technologies as occpying an (ecological?) niche in a similar way to those accupied by humans or other animal species. His aim is to foregrounds the interdependancies existing within and around that niche. Feenberg argues that we are misled into thinking that technologies can stand alone – technologies viewed in isolation can appear uncomplicated and strangely appealing. Perhaps this is one origin of the utopian views of technologies we explored early in the course.
2. What is most obvious is often hidden
Feenberg uses the example of a screen – we are not aware of the screen when we view a film for example. The idea of transparency is prevalent in the discourses of user interface design – when something becomes so common place we cease to be aware that it is there.
3. The paradox of the origin
The idea here is that technologies have a history. There prescence in society now is a result of an evolutionary past. However this past is not immediately obvious. The internet we use today does not broadcast its origins in the way say buildings or the natural environment does. This means that we are less aware of how technological artefacts have evolved and become embedded and intertwined with current social practices. The film “The Social Network” reminds us of the origins of Facebook, something that is not revealed by merely using Facebook today.
4. The Paradox of the Frame
Feenberg agues that we tend to view technology as a purely technical acheivement – a refinement of skills connected with design and manufacture. In reality our technological environment is the way it is because of many other factors e.g. social, economic etc.
5. The Paradox of Action
Often we are not aware of the negative consequences of technology because these are experienced remote from the immediate zone of action. This is in part a consequence of rapid technological development which means there is a lag before all the consequences are realised. This leads to the illusion that technologies can indeed act on the world without consequences for themselves.
6. The Paradox of the Means
Feenberg argues that technologies signify us and define our identities – we are what we do but in relation to technology we are what we use. How more intertwinned can our relationship with technology become? Is this touching on the idea of the cyborg? He summarises this idea in a McLuhanesk “The means are the ends”
7. The Paradox of Complexity
This paradox encapsulates our fixation of the technological object and blindnes to the new context and consequencecs it creates.
8. The Paradox of Value and Facts
Feenberg argues for technological development to be driven by values not just facts – this way technology would evolve in ways better aligned with social value systems
9. The Democratic Paradox
Social groups form around technologies that mediate their relations. Technology mediated groups transform the technology that constitute them. The central idea is the coconstruction of technology.
Feenberg uses this Escher sketch to illustrate his idea. I also like the cyborg version!
10. The Paradox of Conquest
I guess I was loosing focus by the time it come to the final paradox!