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