All the EDC blog posts

When tasked with doing a micro-ethnography I tossed around many ideas… blogging the study, PowerPoint, etc, but I finally settled on using Prezi… honestly because I had never used it, and I wanted to try it.  Hopefully the final project makes sense to the viewer.

I chose to look at the Cayman News Service (CNS) as it is a site which I visit on a daily basis.  I originally only read the news articles, but then began to read the comments section more than the news items themselves.  I found that I could often learn more about the story from the attitudes of other readers.  Unfortunately, a lot of comments began to take the path towards racism and anti-expat sentiments, etc.  Now I find myself skimming them and trying to find the few interesting (coherent) posts among the sea of garbage.

I have lived in the Cayman Islands for 6 years, but there is a sometimes overwhelming attitude towards and resentment of the expatriates who have chosen to move here.  I work at the university, and several times I have been taken aback by student comments during my lectures in which they point blank ask me why I am here.  They are not simply curious, it is asked with the attitude of “you don’t belong… why are you here… taking a job away from me?”

My thought was to look at the CNS website and specifically the idea of a community.  My idea of a community is one in which you feel you belong, where you are made to feel welcome, safe, wanted…  If people don’t feel this in the real life Cayman Islands, can they feel part of a virtual community created about the Cayman Islands?

I chose to take one specific news story in which the premier of the Cayman Islands attacks the media for their requesting documents available through the Freedom of Information Act.  The premier is noted for his outbursts and attacks on the media and bloggers, specifically the CNS website, and has likened them to devil worshipers.  Despite the fact that he is being investigated for corruption, lacks a completed high school education, and has a complete disregard for the rule of law, he remains in power.

This is one of, if not the most commented upon story on the website, and it received 335 comments.  Of those, 184 were posted as anonymous, 127 from pseudonyms, and only 26 comments were from potentially real names.  However since the CNS comment system allows you to create a name and not verify it as factual, it can be argued that all 335 comments were posted anonymously.

If a community is meant to provide a sense of belonging, how can one belong to it anonymously?  Is simply posting a comment, anonymously or not, acceptable for validating your presence in the community?  If everyone is anonymous, how do you become an insider/regular?  Or is it required that you use a pseudonym to gain that level, and join the ranks?

If we accept Block’s sentiments in Community: The Structure of Belonging, in order to be part of a community, a citizen must “hold oneself accountable.”  But is this possible if we are not just anonymous, but afraid to post who we really are?  Does this anonymity negate the possibility of growing the community through acknowledging it is not built by it’s “… great leadership, or improved services; it is built by great citizens.”

I am still not certain of how I feel about the CNS website, comments and forums as a virtual community.  While it may meet some of the definitions, I argue that to belong, one must be willing to open oneself a little to exposure of your ‘true self.’  I understand the need to remain anonymous in the current political environment in the Cayman Islands, but I also feel that if people were courageous enough to post as themselves perhaps people would feel empowered to demand change.

My lifestream this week has been taken up with looking at three areas, the latter two as preparation for deciding on and writing my assignment: the posthuman; politics, digital culture and e-learning; and transliteracy.

I have to admit, on the first subject, I find Haraway’s style detracts from meaning. I am used to the excesses of theory and post-theory writing but Haraway’s often adds more of effect than meaning. By making statements such as ‘the cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity’ I presume she is rejecting a male-centric academic discourse of rationality, but the effect is to draw the eye away from the more interesting points she makes.  For instance she goes beyond the notion of cyborg as machine or part machine, to make very clear its distance from myths  that have underpinned gender politics – ‘Cyborg replication is uncoupled from organic reproduction[…]the cyborg has no origin story in the Western sense’ (Haraway 2000, 35). So the cyborg is not born of woman nor does it relate to the story of Adam and Eve and is therefore devoid of the biological and religious connotations that have inexorably led to the construction of male and female genders. This is interesting, but problematic. If the cyborg is ‘not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust’, what of the notion of sin? Or of the complexity of gender relations and of the identity of those who believe their biological make-up does not match their real identity? One could argue that the posthuman allows these questions and complexities to be overcome by questioning what Hayles (1999) calls ‘the liberal humanist subject’ (4), the idea that human beings are stable, subjective beings with problematic, constructed concepts such as sin, sexual nature and so on. However my problem with Haraway is that cyberfeminism is ‘an effort to contribute to socialist-feminist culture and theory in a postmodernist, non naturalist mode and in the utopian tradition of imagining a world without gender’ instead of an effort to deal practically, politically with the issues of gender which are very real, if constructed by us. Haraway’s idea of the cyborg is, in her own words ‘as a fiction mapping our social and bodily reality and as an imaginative resource suggesting some very fruitful couplings’. It is also ‘an ironic political myth’. Of course myth and fiction can be used politically to explore possibilities, to inspire change or to challenge perception, but the myth of the cyborg seems to me to bypass the thorny problems of gender rather than deal with them head-on, a notion explored by Ilan Gur Ze’ev. Perhaps I am too hard on Haraway (after all she has somewhat of a cult following) but I increasingly find myself impatient with writing that is so self-consciously performative.

On a more practical level, I used my lifestream to document my search for articles on posthumanism and biomedicine/biotechnology as I think that it is within this area that posthumanism is most relevant through such notions and procedures as IVF, prosthetics, genetic enhancement, extreme human enhancement, continued life and health and even cognition and emotion enhancement – one of the obvious questions hanging over biomedicine is the ethical dimension. This has been a particularly fruitful line of enquiry for me as it has brought together this course with my interest in Medicine and the Humanities. However, one of the questions I have been asking myself is whether using technology, even combining the technological and the human or finding the human in the technological, makes the human any less, or more, than it ever was as if it was to be rejected for something new? Does using a PDA make us posthuman or is it no different from someone 50 years ago using a notebook? I don’t deny that AI along with biomedical enhancement seem to blur the lines of what is human but I think we have to be less wholesale in our assessment of what the posthuman means.