Final Exam

“Reading w/ the Digital Human” Course Description

One of Marx's main ideas is that of “historical materialism;" he argues that, rather than ideas, it is the technological developments of an age which change human societies and thus human beings. The spinning jenny brought the Industrial Revolution, and the computer brought what many have come to call the Digital age. The press is no longer the printing press, but the barrage of online and television news outlets—Facebook and Twitter included. The e-mail has replaced “snail mail,” and for some, the internet itself has come to dominate their personal communications so much so as to have almost replaced the “human community.” But what is the human being and what is the human community? Can there be a set of “criteria” that determine whether a human society is functional or dysfunctional? And how do the digital technologies affect the functionality of these societies? In this class, we will explore these questions using texts from the fields of literature, sociology, philosophy, critical theory, and even the blogosphere. One such text is McLuhan's The Medium is the Massage, a book which is itself multi-media in its format, and which deals with pressing questions of the human and the environment, and how the new media come to define the new “global community” that we find ourselves living in right now. It claims that we live in a more participative society; is this still true, or has the internet made us more passive?

We will also challenge, then, what constitutes “reading,” and the importance of reading, and thinking, and most of all, thinking critically, within ever-changing social contexts so that we may achieve a better awareness of our world and a better way to live (actively) in it.

Book: “Pluto” by Urusawa/Tezuka

Synopsis:

Mainly because of Hollywood, we often equate robots with apocalyptic settings. But what about the notion of a robot designed to be completely selfless? In Pluto, we see a modern-day incarnation of Tezuka's “Atom,” the selfless robot. Set in a highly developed world, Pluto commences when a serial killer begins to murder the “greatest robots of the earth,” often beloved robots responsible for much of society's progress.

Some questions for discussion:

The story provides ground to discuss some questions about “humanity” and the “human community.”

1. As robots became more advanced, they were allowed more into human society (ie, the “robot bill of rights”). As a result, there has been a backlash of (racist?) humans who form groups like the anti-robot KKK, etc. How plausible do you think this scenario is? Which side would you take?

2. We see robots “acting like” humans (as Atom does when he pretends to eat ice cream) without experiencing any of the “actual” human feelings. What does this say to the concept of “human” as a social construction?

3. Robots often exchange their “memory chips,” literally containing all their lives' memories. Where is the robot's soul? And where is the human soul?

Final Exam

Course Description:
We are living during an intersection of old and new technology. We are uniquely poised to view the coming world and see how it supplants or enriches what our experience of the world has been. Marshall McLuhan shows us how our mediation of information shapes our reception. Baudrillard expresses our concerns with how our reality is shaped and shapes itself and us. The iPad is an excellent representation of new technology but is in no way unique. It is, however, indicative of the sea change taking place in media and technology.
By “reading” the iPad by reading texts we engage and take part in understanding the future of things to come. The future is now so to speak and we would be remiss not to explore it. We will look into this world through the lens of fiction, theory, and research. We will seek to see not how we are shaping technology but how it is shaping us.
Neither the iPad nor the student is an independent subject separate from each other. We will explore what it means to be human but also put pressure on the need for this distinction. How do we express our human-ness? How does the iPad cyborgize us and us it? At what point are we do we stop being human and become defined by our prostheses? William Gibson’s Neuromancer explored this concept in a fictive dystopian world. We are living in a reality that is not far removed from this fiction. It is time to start looking at the state of humanity and understanding that it is as dynamic and shifting as technology.
Ancillary Text:
In order to more fully understand the enmeshing of humanity into this digital age it is necessary to read Simians, Cyborgs & Women and particularly “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century” by Donna Haraway. It will allow us a theoretical perspective from which to look at the dichotomies not only of machinery and humanity but also that of man and beast and reality and fantasy. It will critique the idea of the holism of nature and how in fact “By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short we are cyborgs.” She will help us dispel the rumor of our untainted humanity and force us to see that we are not only cyborgs now but that we have been for quite some time. Her work shows how we have become a sort of hybrid species equally well adapted for both the natural and unnatural world. We are post-human and advancing.

Jeffrey Muir

Final Exam-Chris Langer

Through Reading W/ the Digital Human, our class confronted the quickly changing world of technology. To what extent are these conventions, reading with paperback books, merely just habituated muscle memory actions that just need to be readjusted. We have naturalized the experience, and part of this class was talking the nostalgia that is reading. How can we get over the passage of the medium and appreciate the content, as opposed to the medium? When did we move past it with paper? It is relatively new, and was seen as an impediment to thoughts and speech at first invention. The habituation of new tasks is the new challenge. What we are experiencing through this transition is a movement from a work to text. Barthes describes a work as “concrete, occupying a portion of book-space,” with the being experienced “only in an activity, a production.” The book is transcending, the novel can cut across works; the medium has changed. This class delved into the world of technology, explored the pyramid of the e-book, and looked forward into what could be the future of learning institutions, as we know it. One of the main fallacies of the rise of digital technology is that technology has lost a human aspect. No technology is “human-less,” and by absorbing new features and implementing them in different fields, technology only furthers human progress. Our study through the Ipad broadened our scope into the penetration of technology in our world.

Additional Text.
I would add Michael Foucault’s “Of Other Spaces” to the syllabus, using it to show the implication of the Ipad as a space itself, something unlike other, but also playing off the influences of the past. Foucault describes a heterotopia, an other space that embodies the functions of society it resides in. A heterotopia is able to, according to the third principle, “juxtapose in a single real space several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible.” An e-book is a representation of this, with it’s ability to bring in multiple forms of medium into one, whether it be the video, audio, or text, the e-book brings all of these together.

Final Exam

Reading (W/) the Digital Human is a course which examines the different ways technology has contributed to our understanding of what it means to be human. Through Massumi, we examined how technology functions as a partial subject, and is therefore crucial to our existence as humans. What Technology Wants provided another (and, some would argue, overly rigid) framework for understanding the role technology plays in the lives of humans. Both of these works had in common a similar tendency to define by interdefining—humanity was defined in relation to other animals as well as technology, and in the case of What Technology Wants, the characteristics of technology were compared incessantly to those of other life forms to establish patterns between different kinds of being, and also to examine the differences. It would appear that it is impossible to define any type of being without reference to other types of being. In support of this observation, Parables for the Virtual offered a metaphysics in which no being was complete unto itself and each only existed as a “partial subject,” a being with the ability to interact with other beings. It was this interaction that defined the different sorts of being; in the same way, humans are defined not by their own existence, but by how they interact with other existent beings. By examining the ways in which humans interact with technology, Reading (W/) the Digital Human created a long, messy web of (inter)defintion for what it means to be human.

The obvious choice for a text to be added to this course would be Donna Haraway’s “A Manifesto for Cyborgs,” which lays a philosophical foundation for cyborg existence (as Neuromancer could be said to provide a practical model of how cyborg existence might become possible). Haraway embraces a more interactive definition of humanity, purged of the mythical essential human—a cyborg culture would be based on the assumption that we were all born (created) “a hybrid of machine and organism”. To be human (or to be existent) is to be a cyborg, a shifting web of “contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes”. For a cyborg, to exist is not to be a whole—it is to be interdefined, to contain and be contained by other existences.

Final Exam

Reading (w/) the Digital Human is, I believe, primarily concerned with dispelling the myth of real versus virtual (a dichotomy pervasive in our culture) and that digital technology represents a ‘new’ (or even better or worse) form of human existence. By starting with the iPad and e-books, we as English majors confronted a topic close to home: The paper book versus the digital copy and whether one is more physical or “real” than the other. This was opened up to the wider field of the digital age including art, music, and social media. It seemed to me that the culmination of the class occurred in Brian Massumi’s Parables of the Virtual, which made clear that all experience is virtual to some degree because of our mind’s reliance on prostheses; using a computer is not that far removed from typing with your hands or viewing through eyes. Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler further drew attention to this mediation and sense of space. It was a physical book that drew attention to its own virtuality and our placement within that strata. Another theme we spent time exploring was what place means in regards to new media; For example, where are you when you are on the internet? You seem to inhabit both, say, a book store and the uncomfortable low backed chair you are sitting in. There are also servers that that data you are browsing seem to physically inhabit. We discussed what this may mean for our consciousness; unfortunately, it became quite clear that there are no easy answers.

I would choose to add what is pretty consistently considered one of the greatest narrative video games of all time, Deus Ex, to the class syllabus. This allows us to explore a different type of digital narrative and media, one that was only touched upon in class when we discussed the “choose your own adventure” stories. What are the differences between an e-book and game? Are the two blending? Further, the game’s story directly deals with themes of prosthesis and the evolution of technologies. It is also steeped in post-cyberpunk culture, thus making William Gibson’s Neuromancer the perfect lead in.

-Andrew Maxwell

Final Exam Essay

Reading (w/) the Digital Human is a course that explores the socio-digital culture that our generation is immersed in.  Particularly in the Western world, society is co-dependent on the technological advances that have happened within the last several decades.  This dependence is seen not only through the physical objects such as cell phones, computers, or e-readers.  However, it is seen within out language, education institutions, and perspectives. Both Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants, as we read in  Marc Prensky’s “Digital Native, Digital Immigrants,” understand techné on varying levels, but society as a whole still sees in terms of their digital dependence. 

Therefore this course was important in understanding the effects that the digital age has had on us and vice versa.  Furthermore, technology will keep advancing in the coming years and future generations so it is imperative to not only understanding but embracing.  If our society thinks in terms of techné then we must utilize it. 

The iPad allowed for this utilization.  I was able to use the iPad in terms of my classes, my scheduling, and social media.  From the beginning of the academic year until now I have a heightened awareness of my digital dependence and can think in terms of it at a scholarly level.      

One of the additional reading I would have added to the class is Crash by J.G. Ballard.  It is a book that would have fit perfectly with the course description. It is about James Ballard who becomes close to a man, Vaughan, and both show each other sexuality in automobile crashes.  This sexuality progresses and forms into a issue of dependency.  The men, and certain women, in the narrative are addicted to technology and can only experience pleasure through violence in cars.

Reading (w/) the Digital Human Tentative Syllabus

Course Description
The goal of this course is to examine, challenge, and dissect the word “human” and the terms and conditions under which we (as a society) use this word. We will attempt to deconstruct “human” by discussion of what it means to be “human,” especially through our exploration of the “human” within common (though perhaps misapplied) dichotomies (i.e., human vs. machine, real vs. digital, human vs. environment). As the name of the course suggests, we will not only be attempting to “read with the digital human,” gauging how we should understand our increasingly digitized environment and the issues that come with it (for example, planned obsolescence, gatekeepers of information, movement between realms of physical and digital, generational gaps, etc.), but also to “read the digital human,” investigating how we have been programmed by the technology that we (as a society) have created. In order to achieve these goals, we will read and discuss several texts over the course of the semester, ranging from theoretical essays to short stories. For example, will examine William Gibson’s cyberpunk novel, Neuromancer, and discuss how its setting, characters, and themes challenge accepted notions of reality and humanity. In this particular novel, we will look at the ontology of prosthetics insomuch as humans use prosthetics (i.e., drugs, body modification, the Internet) to implement or otherwise alter “reality” and “traditional human experience.” Students will hopefully come away from this course having learned to question and to deconstruct the given; rather than assuming, “I am human,” students should ask themselves, “What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to be living? What is reality? Why do these terms matter?”.

Required Reading
Neuromancer by William Gibson
“A Cyborg Manifesto” by Donna Haraway (Available on BB under “Course Materials”)

Justification for Reading
We will be reading “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century” by Donna Haraway. In this essay, Haraway criticizes modern social structure (from a feminist standpoint) by arguing that the term “human” is irrelevant because humans have become “cyborgs” (which she defines as, “creatures simultaneously animal and machine, who populate worlds ambiguously natural and crafted”). This reading has been selected because of Haraway’s close examination of dichotomies (human vs. animal, human vs. machine, science fiction vs. reality, etc.), which results in the deconstruction of the term “human,” a term that is called into question by the very nature of this class.

Recommended Reading
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick

Justification for Recommended Reading
I have chosen to include two novels (Frankenstein and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), which are not required, but which focus on themes relevant to the objections of Reading (w/) the Digital Human. Both of the listed novels question the meaning of the term “human” by depicting technically non-human creatures (Frankenstein’s monster, Replicants), which seem to display a greater scope of human emotions to a greater intensity than actual human characters. These novels beg to know whether it is possible for a creature to be more human than human and whether the accepted system for differentiating human from non-human is intrinsically flawed. I believe that either (or both) of these novels would serve as excellent supplements to Haraway's Cyborg Theory.