Webliography

2. Catherine Waldby argues that contemporary society is gripped by a sense of ‘technogenisis’, ‘the loss of an origin securely located in nature’ wherein the boundary between the natural and technological cannot be easily or concretely positioned. How is this reflected in digital culture?


It is interesting to theorise contemporary society as being gripped by ‘technogenisis’. In Waldby’s article, she cites Frankenstein’s monster as the ‘archetypal techno-monster story’.[1] Are reflections of ‘technogenisis’ in digital culture today similar monster narratives or has this ‘loss of origin securely located in nature’ itself become ‘naturalised’? When considering everyday life, we constantly interact with each other and the world through digital media. Communications are increasingly mediated through digital telephones and the internet, we view culture through the digital camera, television and cinema, sound is digitally mediated through CDs, MP3s and so on. Marx argued that in a capitalist society, interactions are alienated and become relationships between things rather than between people.[2] We could further this argument with relation to the notion of the cyborg in Haraway’s ‘Manifesto for Cyborgs’.[3] In a cyberculture, relationships between things become relationships mediated by digital media. How is digital culture ‘humanised’ whilst at the same time humans are ‘digitalised’? Does the digital self become more ‘real’ than the real self? We can think of this with reference the representations of the self in The Matrix.[4] Another effect of ‘technogenisis’ is the way in which the human body itself becomes theorised. [5] These ideas should be discussed with reference to their representations in digital media.
Mark Poster’s article[6] on the consumption of digital commodities discusses the way that ‘mediated commodities’ are consumed in everyday life. It builds on theories of everyday life written by Baudrillard and de Certeau. Poster makes these theories accessible by summarising the relevant parts in his article. This proves to be useful because I wanted to analyse the ways in which ‘technogenisis’ presented itself through everyday interactions. By juxta positing the highly mediated space of New York with the relatively ‘free’ space of Ljubljana, Poster highlights the ways in which social interaction in a digitally mediated space forces relationship between digital media rather than people. The invasion of both the public and private domain by invasive media is discussed. Poster discusses the social implications of digital media, which although very interesting are not all entirely relevant to this essay
The inclusion of Cohen’s article[7] from New Scientist may seem at first to be less than scholarly. It is true that the article is conversational in style and does not delve particularly deeply into the ‘scientific’ workings of the brain. The reason I find this article useful is to look at the way the brain is re-evaluated in the wake of the advance of digital media. The article quotes John White, a biomedical engineer who analyses the workings of the brain in terms of moving from computers models to mathematical description.[8] Just using one article of this nature is possibly too small a sample to analyse the way digital media has reworked theories on ‘how the body works’ so in my essay I would probably look at a cross section of articles in order to argue my point more strongly.
To complement my argument about the way the brain and body are likened to machines through the advent of digital culture, Klein’s discussion of the mechanical brain[9] explores notions of the brain from Descartes to Hayle’s idea of the posthuman. This article presents the information in sufficient depth, but at time fails to recognise its own biases when theorising about the human body. In spite of this it is still a useful base from which to postulate about how ‘technogenisis’ is reflected in digital culture through dominant ideologies about the human subject while positing these notions firmly in the history of ‘human’ thought.
The nature of media is discussed in Miyagawa’s article from Technosis Quarterly.[10] He discusses how digital media is turning from mass media to personal media where the consumer is not passive but acts as the ‘producer’ also. Specifically he speaks of how personal media must appear to come from the user’s perspective. This comments on the nature of ‘technogenisis’. The consumer of digital media searches for a personal identity within the media since their origins outside it are lost. The article also discusses the ‘humanisation’ of digital media through what Miyagawa refers to as ‘personal media’. This would be a useful part of arguing how loss of origin is attempted to be replaced through the digital media. (Which was the original displacer.)
The concept of the ‘digitalisation’ of the human body is unpacked in [12] It is very useful in exploring the human in its digital representation and what this might say about the status of the ‘real’ human body in digitally mediated culture. It explores the notion of the posthuman body which is an important effect of ‘technogenisis’. Another good point for this reference is its own reference list which leads to more interesting theory on notions of the human body in cyberculture.
Another discussion of the notion of the human body in cyberculture is Herzogenrath’s article in Enculturation.[13] The article discusses the cyborg in a multitude of ways. It discusses the way man is both produced as subject and erased by technology. This article has strong arguments that are well supported by dominant theories and would help create a substantial position for an argument on how the body’s origins can no longer be secured firmly in nature and possible suggestions for what this might mean for the human subject. The exploration of the complex relationship between human and machine emphasises the idea that the distinction between the two cannot easily be made in our highly digitally mediated society.
I believe this selection of online resources will be useful in aiding my discussion on the reflection of ‘technogenisis’ in the digital media. I would also complement this with other texts such as Katherine Hayle’s discourse on the posthuman.[14] I have used articles that explore both historical and contemporary theories. Two other types of theories I have encountered are the ideologies of ‘scientific’ discourse in light of recent technological advances and cultural theories on digital media and its effects on social reality. I realise there realistically would not be enough space to do all of these ideas justice and I would focus on how the human is represented in digital media as well as the ways in which we appropriate the technology itself into ‘human’ forms.


[1] Waldby, Catherine. “The Instruments of Life: Frankenstein and Cyberculture.” Prefiguring Cybercultures: An Intellectual History. Eds. Darren Tofts, Annemarie Jonson and Alessio Cavalaro. Sydney: Power Publications, 2002 28-37.
[2] Haslett, Moyra. Marxist Literary and Cultural Theories. New York: St Martins’s Press, 2000.
[3] Haraway, Donna. ‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s.’, The Haraway Reader, New York and London: Routledge, 2003, pp. 7-45 (originally 1984)
[4] Burbank, Calif. The Matrix Warner Home Video [distributor] 1999
[5] Klein, Herbert G. ‘The Dream of the Mechanical Brain: The Rise and Fall of AI’ Enculturation, Vol. 3, No. 1, Fall 2000 http://enculturation.gmu.edu/3_1/klein.html (Accessed 31 August 2004)
[6] Poster, Mark. ‘Consumption and Digital Commodities in the Everyday’, Cultural Studies Vol. 18 No. 2/3 March/May 2004 pp 40 -423 http://80-cmo.library.uwa.edu.au.ezproxy.library.uwa.edu.au/04158.pdf (accessed 31 August 2004)
[7] Cohen, Philip. ‘Small World Networks Key to Memory.’ New Scientist 26 May 2004
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99995012 (Accessed 31 August 2004)
[8] Cohen, Philip. ‘Small World Networks Key to Memory.’ New Scientist 26 May 2004
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99995012 (Accessed 31 August 2004)
[9] Klein, Herbert G. ‘The Dream of the Mechanical Brain: The Rise and Fall of AI’ Enculturation, Vol. 3, No. 1, Fall 2000 http://enculturation.gmu.edu/3_1/klein.html (Accessed 31 August 2004)
[10] Miyagawa, Shigeru. Technos Quarterly Summer 2002 Vol. 11 No. 2 http://www.technos.net/tq_11/2miyagawa.htm (Accessed 31 August 2004)
[11] Thacker, Eugene. ‘.../visible_human.html/digital anatomy and the hyper-texted body’ Ctheory.net 6/2/1998 http://www.ctheory.net/text_file.asp?pick=103 (Accessed 31 August 2004)
[12] Waldby, Catherine. ‘The Visible Human Project: An Initial History’ in The Visible Human Project: Information and Posthuman Medicine. London and New York: Routledge, 2000, pp. 1- 18
[13] Herzogenrath, Bernd. ‘The Question Concerning Humanity: Obsolete Bodies and (Post)Digital Flesh’ Enculturation, Vol. 3, No. 1, Fall 2000
http://enculturation.gmu.edu/3_1/herzogenrath/index.html (Accessed 31 August 2004)
[14] Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. University of Chicago Press, 1999.