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Technology and the Self: Request for book recommendations (sorry)

16:52 / 13.01.02

So sorry to be (mis)using the forum so selfishly... I really need to be pointed in the direction of some anthropology-ish books on technology and the self, and I wondered if anyone here could help... Basically, I am writing a 4,000 report around this area as part of my final year exams. More specifically, I am interested in looking at some of the following areas:

1) Fictionsuits, online identities - the ways in which people express different aspects of themselves online, or create 'whole new personas'.
2) AIs: acknowledging the selfhood of non-humans in the context of potential technologies.
3) In a more biological sense - how transplants affect the notion of the self - perhaps stuff about recipients 'taking on the personal characteristics' of the donor?
4) Gender and technology - using technology to externally express internal gender - via hormones, surgery, for instance.
5) Do genes make the self?
6) Cosmetic surgery?

Any recommendations would be so very much appreciated. Thanks!

The Sinister Haiku Bureau

17:11 / 13.01.02

No need to apologise (IMHO, at least). Off the top of my head, some of Douglas Rushkoff's non-fiction might be worth a look (for point1). My flatmate told me about this website on the singularity http://www.sysopmind.com/
which seems to contain a lot of interesting stuff about AI, though I haven't read much of it yet....not entirely sure if it's what you're looking for though...
If I think of anything else, I post it.... I'm not sure how helpful that was, or how anthropology-ish they are....

17:41 / 13.01.02

For number 1 I would recommend My Tiny Life by Julian Dibbell, excerpt here. Details the politics and lifestyles of Lambdamoo one of the first online communities. I'm not sure if anything has been done on messageboards specifically. I remember researching something similar a while ago and coming across a few journal papers examining usenet, the study of flaming, trolling and so on. In most uni libraries I've been to there is a small philosophy of computing section beside all the coding books, should find plenty of stuff there.

05:27 / 14.01.02

Thanks people, much appreciated. I'll definitely check them out.

The Sinister Haiku Bureau

05:28 / 14.01.02

Again, not really sure how relevant this is, but it might be worth mentioning Kevin Warwick, a guy at Reading Uni (IIRC) who became the first cyborg, by installing a transmitter under his skin, allowing doors to open automatically for him and so on. the next two stages apparrently involve adding stuff which can be controlled by his nervous system, and the third stage involves gtting his wife similarly hooked up so they can send information directly from one nervous system to the other....

05:53 / 14.01.02

Definitely relevant, thank you. Not sure if I will be able to work it in - I am having real trouble keeping in my head what exactly I am supposed to be writing about...but definitely good to know. Thanks!

Haus about we all give each other a big lovely huggle?

07:22 / 14.01.02

The War of Desire and Technology in the Computer Age, by Rosanna Alucquere (sp?) stone has an eenteristing article on ficuits and is generally a good read. Umm..Haraway, the Cyborg Manifesto and Lyotard on the inhuman are dimly remembered as good stuff on non- or post-human selfhood...

07:29 / 14.01.02

Yep, the Haraway occurred to me, too. Looking the others up on Amazon as I type. Thanks, Haus!

Goodness Gracious Meme

15:03 / 14.01.02

gahh just lost this

more cult. studs. than anth. but try

cyberspace, cyberbodies, cyberpunk looks at cyberpunk (lit minaly ) with particular emphasis on technologies of embodiment

Brenda Laurel is [i]the[i/] bod for Gender and AI, she's done shitloads of research on this at MIT, sorry can't remember article titles offhand...

Goodness Gracious Meme

15:06 / 14.01.02

you could also look at writing around the practices of visual artists Orlan and Stelarc, both of whom use various techonologies to intervene in their physical forms or extend notions of currently acceptable levels of cyborg-ness

(eg moving from hearings aids, corrective plastic surgery into remote controlled prosthetic limbs, Orlan having plastic surgery to remodel her face into a planned ideal female face that she composed by morphing various features held up as models of feminine beauty, eg taking the mona lisa's smile and mixing it with audrey hepburn's eyes etc.)

check out Stelarc's stelarc's website

And this is much more philosophy-based , but maybe tekhnema might be worht a look, it's an online journal looking at the role of 'technology' in it's widest sense in messing with distinctions/boundaries bewteen arts/humanities/sciences. look for articles by howard caygill, he specialises in technologies and the body.

[ 14-01-2002: Message edited by: Lick my plums, bitch. ]

Goodness Gracious Meme

07:50 / 15.01.02

oh and as i seem to be on a roll, a look around the sussex uni cognitive science dept website might be interesting, it's an interdiscplinary dept which is internationally known, combining pyschologists/philosophers/ethnographers, computer programmers to research cognition from all angles etc ... focus v. much on artificial life over artificial intelligence...

07:55 / 15.01.02

Wow, thanks, loadsa stuff there. Much appreciated!

Goodness Gracious Meme

08:52 / 15.01.02

body, space, technology might be interesting, know nowt about it but just come across while lookinhg for something else. bunging it here for meself as much as anything!

12:10 / 15.01.02

This is a fascinating essay on the technological singularity, written by sci-fi writer and maths professor Vernor Vinge, albeit 10 years ago. It’s also going-in-at-the-deep-end slightly with technological prediction (well, the emergence of superhuman intelligence within the next 20 years and the subsequent physical extinction of humankind seems a bit…rash).
Interesting stuff, though – a sample quote:

“The post-Singularity world will involve extremely high-bandwidth networking. A central feature of strongly superhuman entities will likely be their ability to communicate at variable bandwidths, including ones far higher than speech or written messages. What happens when pieces of ego can be copied and merged, when the size of a self-awareness can grow or shrink to fit the nature of the problems under consideration?”

It seems that in the early 90s everyone was getting very excited about the imminent spread of technologies like VR and AI – which do start to erode the bedrock of centuries-old rationalist definitions of things like the self – but now they’ve gone a bit quiet (am I wrong?). I suppose that was when people first saw these possibilities on the horizon (hmm, psychedelic drugs were also very in fashion at the time- you don't say!).

[ 15-01-2002: Message edited by: Meme Buggerer ]

17:35 / 15.01.02

put "posthuman" in any search engine.

Haus about we all give each other a big lovely huggle?

06:34 / 16.01.02

Oh, the War of Desire and....has a section on the Atari Lab which is, like, the secret origin of Brenda Laurel.

I love her.

She's great.

12:36 / 08.02.02

Try:

Star, S.L. (ed.) The Cultures of Computing. Oxfd: Blackwell
Turkle, S., Life on the screen. London: Widenfield and Nicholson.

Oh and anything Knodge has posted and compare it to the "loveable rogue" he is IRL.

13:57 / 10.02.02

Thanks, everyone. Got my plan sorted out for this, gonna focus entirely on online identity. Just got to write it now...

17:55 / 14.02.02

You could also check out Ray Kurzweil's website, www.kurzweilai.net. Lots of links to lots of different essays and articles. Interesting stuff.

18:17 / 14.02.02

crap, came upon this too late... feel free to PM for further reading, Cholister

09:06 / 15.02.02

quote:Originally posted by Cholister:

5) Do genes make the self?

Now that you've narrowed the focus, I can't tell if this will as be much help to you, but Susan Blackmore's Meme Machine discusses some of you're original questions.

09:06 / 15.02.02

Basically you want to start off with selective readings of "The Cybord Handbook" which is in Routledge and which is a reader of all the major Cyborg writings and work from there...