Technics, Technology & Being Human

A few members of our group were away last week so here is a compilation of my notes. The theme of the lecture was directly linked to our project with some fantastic links to authors and some brilliant ideas surrounding Post-Humanism. Thank you Bernadette for a fantastic lecture.

-       Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time – How being immersed in a culture like this changing our experiences of being human? How are our perceptions being changed? Our sense of time and space? Since 1950’s this has been around so we know have a history of this.

How our interactions with this has had effects on us as humans?

Andrew Feenberg, Questioning Technology, Routledge, London,1999;

Mark Poster, Information Please : Culture and Politics in the Age of Digital Machines, Duke University Press, London, 2006

What’s the matter with the Internet? University of Minnesota Press,

Lot of PRO-TECHNOLOGY & ANTI-TECHNOLOGY

We’re never really offline. The speed of development that this has occurred is going to increase rapidly. Digital culture involves a lot more than sitting at a computer screen.

Historical Context:

Television x(1953) people were also very worried about the introduction of this technology

Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (1975)

-       Television was invented as the result of scientific and technical research. Its power as a medium of news and entertainment was then so great that it altered all preceding media of news and entertainment.

-       Has unforeseen consequences on some of the central processes of family, cultural and social life.

-       Is it turning us into this passive audience, exploited and emphasized elements of a passivity, a cultural and psychological inadequacy, which had always been latent in people

Humans have no ability to shape their futures, Twitter. The extent to which technology shapes social change. We see ourselves as being the drivers of technologies.

Culture is a passive agent in comparison to technology which is an active agent.

Technological Determinism?

-       Suggests that, in the relationship between technology and culture, culture is passive agent and technology active

-       Or that culture and society ‘react’ to technological developments in a cause-and-effect

-       ‘ Electronic culture promotes the individual as an unstable identity in a continuous process of multiple identity formation.’

Mark Poster, The Second Media Age

Rene Descartes

-Discourse on the Method, 1637

- One of the principles architects of humanism

- Reason is “the only thing that makes us men and distinguishes us from the beasts”

- “This innate power of judging well and distinguishing the true from the false…is naturally equal in all men”

My capacity of things that makes me human. Essentially different from the non-human. I think therefore I am .

Humanness is potentially something more distributed that we potentially previously thought. “The Body Without Organs”

Post-humanism

“Before the next 21^st century is over, human beings will no longer by the most intelligent or capable type of entity on the planet. Actually, let me take that back. The truth of that last statement depends on how we define human…the primary political and philosophical issues of the next century will be the definition of who we are” – The Age of Spiritual Machines, London, Orion, Ray Kurzweil

-       These remarks aren’t so outlandish when we look at the world we live in now.

-       We’re already post human. Continuity of self.  We can’t assumed that there is a continuity of oneself.

-       Judgements can not be motorized.

Katherine Hayles – How We Became Post-human: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatism 

Thinking is difficult to define. This agenda has driven the technological developments. Can we tell the difference between the digital device and a machine?

Didn’t think embodiment was important. This induced an intense debate about what intelligence is. Does not have to be human. Can be embedded in circuit body. How do we manipulate information, not the way that bodies interact with each other.

We are able to be in two places at ounce. Able to distribute ourselves that we’re previously thought unthinkable. This logic is now so embedded in us.

CAPTCHA – to tell humans and machines apart.

This is a massive innovation.Shifting that the human is at the centre of everything. Nothing exists any more or any less. We as humans interact with things

“From Norbert Wiener on, the flow of information through feedback loops has been associated with the deconstruction of the liberal humanist subject.”

Hayles and “Regimes of Computation”

“ If biology is really just pattern code and sequence then how does this fact change the conventional property relations surrounding biological materiality? How has our understanding of the relationship between organism and environment changed in light of recent networked forms of information?

Is technology providing materials for new ways of life?

“Whether we consider the extension of the stone age human;s appendage through the grasp of a hunting tool; the mobile entity constituted by a bipedal organism mounted on a quadripedal organism; the ocular-solar/celestial interaction of Earthly human navigation, or the human ingestion of other species of plants and animals for sustenance- the inscription of ‘human’ has always been marked by liminal encounters.”

We are the children of computers. We see the universe through the eyes of computers. Our understanding of the world is formed through the way we interest with the computer. We’ve always been parted crafted by one another. Adapted and changed by technology. Technology needs to be thought of as the thing that defines the human. Aknowledging  this sense of shift and disvaluing  it at the same time. we’ve always been post-human*

Digital is not an attachment of the real. We interact with it in a complex dynamic which we need to be aware of.

The boundaries  are permeable.

Foucault

“A normalizing society is the historical outcome of the technology  of power centred on life.”