Neil's E-learning and Digital Cultures Blog

Over the last 2 weeks I have been wrestling with 2 threshold concepts; Posthuman and Cyborg. Until I get a handle on at least one of these, I can not move forward in my learning. For this posting, I am going to concentrate on posthuman.

My initial issue is that I need to understand what is meant by “human” before I can really accommodate the notion of “posthuman”. The aspect I’ve struggled with most is the idea that posthuman means the use of tools. I am of the firm belief that the use of tools is an integral part of being human.

The situation seemed to clarify itself for me with an incident that happened over the weekend. A friend recently moved home to a more remote part of the Emirates and I helped him shift. We discovered that not only 3G but also basic phone connection was sporadic and weak. He is not much into cooking and wanted to keep his life simple so he bought a single hot plate. His purchasing decision was based on how it looked: sleek, black, glass, minimal touch functions. When trying to make coffee in his espresso pot, the hot plate refused to work. However, earlier, he’d been able to heat up some food in a pot. When I arrived, we decided that we could work this out. This is, I believe, a basic human characteristic.

First assumption was that the hot plate was broken. But it worked when the curry pot was put back on. Therefore, it was clearly operational.

Second assumption was that it had something to do with the bottom of the pot as the curry pot was smooth and the espresso pot was ridged.

After a lot of time we’d narrowed it down to either material (all the stainless steel pots worked) or design (all the ridged bottoms did not work).

Finally, the next day, when in an internet accessible zone of the desert, we were able, in 3 minutes, to find out what was really going on. The smooth smart black hot plate was based on induction cooking and would work with ferromagnetic cookware only.

What did this tell me?

First of all that human curiosity and use of tools is inherent and it is a basic human need to solve problems. That almost always involves some kind of tool, even if I haven’t made the tool myself. For example, my friend’s daughter was able to open my iPhone in India with a darning needle as I’d forgotten the little tool that opens the SIM drawer. So, in the hot plate situation, we used all sorts of tools to test the cooking ability of the hot plate. Actually heating food to eat was forgotten in the process.

The solution came when we were able to access the internet (good old Wikipedia) using another tool, the iPhone. I think, for me, that is the moment we became posthuman. Through the use of a tool, a sophisticated one admittedly, we were able to access an unseen yet highly potent body of knowledge that was far greater than our combined knowledge to date. In addition, it was solved in less than 3 minutes.

This set me wondering. Look at the Mayan people. They had a highly sophisticated civilisation. Conventional history makes much of the fact that their weapons were no match for the Spanish. Yet, in the preSpanish context, their weapons were superior and highly successful. Gunpowder, cavalry and steel trounced stone and wood. So, many historians have called the Spanish “more advanced”. And yet Mayan science, knowledge and technology is arguably closer to posthuman than Spanish when we consider the Mayan calendar and their advanced astrological observations. The Spanish came from the context of the Inquisition which had actively sought to destroy science. Posthuman, therefore, cannot be seen as a linear development, which is how I think it’s coming across in the readings and some discussions. The Mayans created an immense body of advanced knowledge that was accessed by successive generations through their writing and architecture. For me, posthuman is when we use a tool eg a system of writing or an iPhone, to access an advanced, accumulative body of knowledge that then assists us in solving a current issue. Is this making sense?

As some of the more recent Tweets have suggested, I think that posthuman is something that we can tap into and have been able to tap into throughout history without ever achieving a full-time, full scale posthuman state. If you could pluck a clerk from an 18th century counting house, you could train him to use our technology (and perhaps avert a monumental financial crisis to boot). There is not, I believe, anything inherently different in our brains at this point in history which makes us posthuman. It is our use of what we have created (or had created for us) that makes our applications of knowledge and our paths to those applications posthuman. It is a part-time state.

I suspect that there’s is some very human hubris involved, too, in this reaching out for an advanced state of evolution. However, a quick look around the globe and we can see that though the technology has changed, the basic motivators of conquest, oppression and parochial xenophobia have not.