Cyborg Yeast

The main issue lay with PostHuman.  Things that helped were changing the meanings I’d previously given to the name.  I stopped thinking of it as post = after in the sense of a linear development and saw it more as post = after as in “we’re finished with that”.  Edwards’ article on Lifelong Learning was crucial reading in helping me put the pieces together.

Not so much post as plus - a little bit extra

As others on the course have noted, the human element of posthuman is still the same in terms of the motivators and drivers of human endeavour.  But the notions that Edwards postulates of matters of concern, gathering and the avoidance of separation of meaning from matter started to make sense (on the 3rd and subsequent reading).  “Entanglement of human and non-human in the enactment of the world” (Edwards, 2010) suggested a more pragmatic approach to knowing and hence learning especially when put into context with Freud’s “education is an impossible profession” statement.

So I went looking online for examples that I could make sense of.  It wasn’t as easy as finding my Cyborgs.  Then I spotted the argument now raging between Pankaj Mishra and Niall Ferguson in the London Review of Books over Mishra’s review of Ferguson’s latest work; Civilisation: the West and the Rest.  Without going into the details, the issue lies over a concept or rather a number of concepts: imperialism, colonialism, racism being chief.  Ferguson is known for his stance that all empires were not bad all of the time.  Mishra is an eminent author and critic from India and rejects that notion.

So is this a gathering?  What do these concepts represent?  What is the difference between colonialism, imperialism, globalism, nationalism and so on?  Can the meaning be separated from the matter?  As Edwards puts forward, central to the PostHuman condition are conditionality, fallibility, experimentation and responsibility.  Adding richness and depth is his reference to Biesta’s work on Emancipatory Ignorance: trust without ground, transcendental violence, responsibility without knowledge.  There seemed to be enough of this happening in the Mishra/Ferguson tussle to justify some element of posthumanism.  Without a doubt, neither side is infallible and both are experimenting with knowing as they push against historical tides.  Both are risk takers as evidenced by their contentious work (Mishra on Kashmir, for example, or Ferguson on the British Empire) and this recent clash denotes transcendental violence on a massive scale with challenge, confrontation, the role of difference (accusations of racism, counter allegations of academic sloppiness) and otherness.

Niall Ferguson

What hooked me into this as a posthuman gathering was the idea that these writers (as educators) had unlimited responsibility for the “emergence of the world”.  In other words, as they become entangled with both the matter and the meaning of their knowing subject, through a technical forum, the ripples from their gathering will inform and engage others.  This is not the representation of fact but a grappling, an engaging with matters of concern and their high voltage entanglement has arisen from experimentation.  (Not so long ago, no historian would have dared suggest that the European Empires were anything but bad, for example).  What remains to be seen is if it qualifies as “responsible”.

Matters of Concern

Isolation. Weeks 8 & 9 have highlighted the isolation of being an online learner. I attended a panel discussion last week on the topic of Online Learning in the UAE and this was a recurring theme. Though I fought the inclination to agree, I realised that it is true. Posthuman and Cyborg are big concepts and the readings take a lot of time to digest and understand but we have no sync time together. Wallwisher just isn’t doing it for me as it’s too much like sticking a PostIt on a wall and walking away. Twitter helps (I say this as someone who hated using Twitter in IDEL!) but the sole consolation has been reading other blogs and postings. Up till now, I’ve shied away from doing that too much and tend to wait until after a block is over before “visiting”. I don’t want to be overly influenced and I don’t want to feel I’ve walked away with others’ ideas.

Ivory Tower? Splendid isolation?

But, every now and again one needs a howf; a place to go where you’ll bump into people you know and be able to talk over the pressing events of the day.

A shelter or meeting place

Week 8 was a local holiday here as we celebrated Eid Al Adha. This made me realise also how non-posthuman we are. There are no “e-holidays” and even in the real world, there are very few occasions, if any, when every country celebrates the same holiday at the same time. Even Christmas is a moveable feast and, when I lived in Saudi Arabia, was totally forbidden. So, no matter how much we may invest in an online presence, our reality is affected by such things as real life holidays! For example, this course follows a semester determined by Western climate and religion. If I’d gone with an Australian university, I’d be on a completely different timescale and a different one again if “located” in India. So, I was on holiday but the course was not. When the course goes on holiday, I won’t. It’s interesting to note how this has an impact on my relationship with my online world. I had the choice of spending time in the desert but with drastically limited internet access or spending time in the city in all its broadband, 3G facilitated glory. I chose the former, enjoying the chance to mull over ideas and read up on the topics. But time goes and I returned to a denuded LifeStream and the realisation that there is not much time to mull things over and no sync session to look forward to.

Distribution of sweets to children to celebrate Eid.

So, my LifeStream this week represents the results of plunder as I’ve raided the Tweets for ideas and links. I also owe a lot to my course colleagues for their thoughts and words as they have helped me more than anything else to get to grips with these new concepts.

We are on holiday now for a week to celebrate Eid Al Adha, so though I’m not leaving the country, I am travelling up to the North to stay with friends on a date farm.  I’ll have no internet access for much of the time though my readings are all on my iPad.  This will be a new test of how my online presence will be affected by my apparent disappearance.

PS went to see RA.One in which a computer game villain hijacks the “digital rays” which fill the real world and he, yes, crosses over.  Interesting to see what powers he was given in the real world and how again we are still at the stage where the digital world represents a threat.  More on that next week when I become posthuman.

How much of this affects our digital culture?  I suspect that many people get into comfortable ruts online just as they do in the real world.  It’s an overused phrase these days, but “early adopters” remain few in number and most of us (well, me) react to online elements that have been suggested to us (or me).  And we want things to work.  I want my interaction with my online presence to be seamless and flowing.  However, this is not always the case.  I’ve spent 2 days trying to download software in college that would be great for my final assignment.  But it’s incompatible with my newly issued laptop.  This is where the frustration comes in and we find that we need our culture to support us.  In our real world culture, if something upsets me I can phone a friend or go for a walk.  When the whirly wheel on the download report sticks in the virtual mud and refuses to whirl again, what do I do?

"Like a spiral within a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel, ever turning, every spinning..."

I think that this is why the ethnography assignment has been so interesting.  I’ve been observing an online group that provides support to teachers.  Now I’m conscious of how solitary my online presence has been as I tend to  reinvent the wheel rather than ask for help.

And that fear?  I’ll be forever haunted by the scene from “The IT Crowd” where Jen brings “the internet” to the shareholders’ meeting and then “breaks it”.  Laugh though I will, part of me, deep down inside, thinks that this may actually be possible.

As a language teacher, much of my online presence is occupied with finding resources, practice materials and classroom stimuli, so I wanted these to feed into my life as a student.

I also decided that I should show some of the things that divert me and amuse me when I need a boost.  So, a couple of videos from YouTube, for example.  Perhaps not particularly edifying but definitely things I would miss if I didn’t have when I feel fed-up (long live Dawn French).

"Take a chance on Dawn"

There are links to some stories I’ve read and things I’ve been doing online.  This week I upgraded my iPhone and iPad to iOS5.  This was scary as I’ve heard lots of stories about things going horribly wrong.  They didn’t.  But since upgrading, I’ve been interested in iCloud and that’s in the LifeStream, too.  All in all, I realise that I’m not much of an active member of groups and that is also reflected in my LifeStream; I seem to enjoy dipping in to things I need or want without hanging around much.  In college, I’m part of a team that helps answer BBVista queries on our “Get Satisfied” site but that is strictly off-limits to the LifeStream, unfortunately.  Sadly, also discovered that the new Guardian App is not available here.  So, I’ll have to stick to old-fashioned reading the paper online.  So not cool!

Not scary at all!

When was the last time your log in said, "I've missed you!"

My first reaction was guilt.  Feelings of niggling, unshuttupable guilt.  The word “should” figured prominently in my thinking as I drove home or sat in on presentations or caught the last 15 minutes of “Come Dine With Me” (as an ex-pat, such images of the Mother Ship are fascinating – a nation obsessed still with bedside cabinet secrets, overcooked meat and creme caramel…)  I should be doing things online.

Then, with my eyes red-rimmed with air-conditioning delivered flu germs, I lay down and thought, “Why?”  Just as I’ve noticed that many colleagues try to be much nicer on FB than they are in the coffee shop on campus, was I trying to be something I wasn’t in my Life Stream?  My internet usage focusses on gleaning articles of the right size, composition and topic to use in my classes.  Of making word puzzles and games using SCORM packages to be delivered in Blackboard Vista.  Or using SafeAssign to ferret out the plagiarists.  Do these things belong in my LifeStream?  If so, how to get them there?

But what also of all the things I can’t show?  I live in a country with very strict censorship laws.  While preparing my visual artefact, I wanted to use images by the artists Pierre et Gilles.  One of the images is banned here.  Not just on a macro level but also at a micro one, too ie individual pages in Flickr etc have been found and added to the banned list.  My employers check the internet for negative postings by both present and former employees.  So, how much risk do I take?  How much do I reveal?  Am I absent because I was sick?  Had a bit of whiplash?  Got too tired?  Or is it because the digital world opens up a world of possibilities but, as Hand pointed out, a world that is possibly more policed, more censored, more controlled than I can imagine?

Nothing is bio-degradable online.  Nothing is ever truly deleted.  Nothing is ever wiped clean.  Much has been made of the use of Social Media in the recent “Arab Spring” or the English riots.  Where’s the follow-up?  How many of the bloggers have been tracked down and subsequently arrested?  The digital world has much to offer but, as is often said of public opinion, while it’s voice is loud, it’s memory is short.  We invest time, effort, money, emotion in our digital selves.  The question I still can’t answer is why?

It can change your life.

Who is interested?  Does it matter if no-one ever sees your blog or your online creations?  Is it enough to know that you have created and it’s “out there”?  If I hide behind false ids to make my postings, am I being deceitful?  How much editing do I do when I’m deciding on what goes in to the LifeStream and what stays out?  Is my recent absence because I felt exposed?  Yes, a bit.  So much of what we do online is done in a bubble – we sit alone watching our words and images take on a new life on screen but, I suspect, do not necessarily compute the full impact of such words online to an audience that is potentially greater than fellow course participants, tutors and friends we’ve sent the links to!  This week, as I battled with a failing, creaking, groaning internet connection that is afflicting the Gulf at present, I found myself wondering about who might make what out of this type of digital presence.  Maybe too much thinking about the uncanny.  But it did make me take a moment (or several hundred moments) to ask; who’s out there and what are they doing with me?

"I can smell you!"

I’m running out of storage space on WordPress as I’ve been using too many images.  This has set me thinking of the limitations placed upon e-culture; you want to say “You said I could express myself and now I have to choose?” My personal task this week has been to closely look at how I use e-culture and how much of that I would like to share. My conclusion is that I, for the moment, I’m not comfortable with sharing! My LifeStream illustrates a small fraction of my e-usage. My task now is to see how much more of that unseen footage can be brought in.

Draw your own conclusions

As an aside, it turns out that comments posted on FB etc by former employees are being tracked and informal warnings issued. This may explain some of my unease at sharing too much!

Listening to a Guardian Books podcast this week, Colin Thubron spoke of how he believes more and more young people are turning their backs on virtual travel and returning to personal, physical experience (my paraphrasing). This set me wondering. Was I really an e-culture inhabitant or a cultural tourist? At the moment, I’m very much a tourist. I’ve gone out to the right shops to buy my travelling equipment in the form of accounts to sites I seem unsure how to use. A bit like buying a big rucksack; you suspect you’ll need it but it looks so much uglier, bulkier and rougher than the sleek little McMcQueen Samsonite carry-on

Sleek, silver, sinuous

So, just as before any big trip, a lot of foutering around. Nothing is booked, reserved or really planned. Both exciting and anxiety-inducing!