7/28/2019 Digital Selves for Digital Homes

1/3

Digital Homes for Digital Selves

Dr. Dennis M. Weiss

York College

English and Humanities Department

This presentation explores accounts of space, community, and self in the emerging cyberculture, focusing on the manner in

which cyberspace has been conceived as a place for community and a context for fashioning self-identity. It suggests that popu-lar conceptions of cyberspace have been shaped by three dominant metaphoric constructions (place-based metaphors, cyber-

space-as-mind, and the post human). Both individually and collectively these constructions reveal significant tensions and i n-adequacies, especially in their implications for our understanding of human nature and subjectivity. These inadequacies are ap-

parent when brought out in comparison with more substantive accounts of human selves, as in the work of Charles Taylor,feminist philosophers such as Annette Baier and Maria Lugones, and philosophical anthropologists such as Mary Midgley.

Phase One: Place-Based Metaphors Cyberspace as Third Place: Perhaps cyberspace is one of the infor-mal public places where people can rebuild the aspects of commu-

nity that were lost when the malt shop became a mall. (Rheingold,The Virtual Community)

Blacksburg Electronic Village: Wereproviding an analogue of the

old general store front porch. (Andrew Cohill)

CyberTimes: If the Web is a community, think of this as its town

square.In a world as complex as the Web, its reassuring to knowthere is, in fact, a town square.

Apple E-World: From your first birds-eye view of the inviting

communication and information village, you discover a distinctlydifferent kind of on-line service.

The Electronic Agora: I see a new Athenian Age of democracy

forged in the fora the Global Information Infrastructure will cre-

ate.(Vice President Gore)Problems With Place-Based Metaphors

Tensions within this metaphor ultimately destabilize place-based

constructions of cyberspace. A technology implicated in the dissolu-

tion of space is unlikely to reconstitute place-based community.

The technology of social saturation works toward the dissolution of

homogeneous, face-to-face communities, and toward the creation of

a polymorphous perversity in social pattern. Both the character and

the potentials of the community are transformed in substantial

ways. (Gergen, The Saturated Self)Virtual communities are a simulacra of community premised upon

fear, nostalgia and the desire for control, security, and homogeneity.

The tension in these place-based

metaphors is suggested by PackardBells advertising campaign

Wouldnt you rather be at home?, created by M&C Saatchi, which

counterposes a dytopian urban night-mare to the perfection of suburbia.

Mel Ransom, VP of Marketing: We

want to educate the public that manytasks which at one time required a

person to leave the house can be donefrom the comfort of their home with

a Packard Bell PC. Cyberspaceguarantees that we will never have to

leave our suburban dreamlands andrisk encounter with the other.

7/28/2019 Digital Selves for Digital Homes

2/3

Phase TwoCyberspace as Nonspace of the Mind

Early attempts to conceptualize cyberspace as a kind of place gave way to cyberspace as an opposi-

tional space of mind.

In technology, economics, and the politics of nat ions, wealthin the form of physical resources

has been losing value and significance. The powers of mind are everywhere ascendant over the

brute force of things (Dyson, et al, Cyberspace and the American Dream)

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyber-

space, the new home of Mind.Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not

where bodies live. (Barlow, Declaration of Independence for Cyberspace)

As a result of the opening of Cyberspace, humanity is now undergoing the most profound transfor-

mation of its history. Coming into the Virtual World, we inhabit information. Indeed, we become

information. Thought is embodied and the flesh is made word. (Barlow, Crime and Puzzlement)

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination

experienced daily by billions of legitimate

operators, in every nation, by children be-

ing taught mathematical concepts A

graphic representation of data abstracted

from the banks of every computer in the

human system. Unthinkable complexity.

Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of

the mind, clusters and constellations of

data. Like city lights, receding

Neuromancer, William Gibson

The apotheosis of this conceptualization of cyberspace is the

claim made by, among others, Hans Moravec and Ray Kurzweil

that in this future world of mind we shall become mind chil-

dren, shedding the limitations of the body and downloading our

selves into cyberspace. Being digital is being disembodied, be-coming pure mind. In the nonspace of the mind that is cyber-

space, the body is thought to be the source of failure, disgust,

limitation that must be overcome in order to become pure mind.

As programmer and hacker Charles Lecht puts it, Youre stuck

in the mire of pig shit. All of us are. Youve got to be free of

that. Youve got to become pure mind.

Once again, though, internal tensions destabilize this metaphoric construc-

tion of cyberspace. While reconfiguring the space of cyberspace from a

typical third place to the nonspace of the mind, this metaphor preserves

within this new space a view of the self/subjectivity defined by a tradi-

tional Christian/Cartesian framework. The self maintains its agency,boundaries, and purity and achieves eternal life once freed from the prison

of the body. More recently, however, theorists have identified cyberspace

with the realm of the post: the postmodern and posthuman, which lays

siege to the modernist and Enlightenment self central to this construction

of cyberspace.

7/28/2019 Digital Selves for Digital Homes

3/3

From the perspective of this thirdphase, previous constructions of cyber-space are wedded to an outmodedmodern, Enlightenment framework.Cyberspace in fact has wrought a com-

plete break with these older modernistand Cartesian frameworks and, asStone argues, gives rise to new collec-tive structures and gives new meanings

to agency, identity, the body, and community. She de-scribes this new technosocial space as a cyborg habitatcomposed of emergent technologies, shifting boundaries,optional embodiments, where the social space becomescomputer code (37-38). Cyberspace is portrayed less as atool and more as a social space where inhabitants ofMUDs and MOOs create multiple, fragmented, decen-tered selves. Cyber-theorists such as Poster, Mark Tay-lor, Donna Haraway and Jay David Bolter, as well as

popular press authors such as Kevin Kelly (Wired), JaronLanier, and Max More (the Extropians) argue that theuses of new informational technologies are leading to theemergence of a new networked, non-hierarchical, rela-tional culture in which traditional boundaries betweenhuman and machine, nature and culture, are blurred if notradically rewritten.

No ambition, however extravagant, no fantasy, how-

ever outlandish, can any longer be dismissed as

crazy or impossible. This is the age when you can

finally do it all. Suddenly technology has given us

powers with which we can manipulate not only ex-

ternal reality

the physical world

but also, andmuch more portentously, ourselves. You can become

whatever you want to be.

Ed Regis: Meet the Extropians

Problems with the Post1. The posthuman is premised on the very nature/culture split it avows.

A more adequate account of nature/culture might suggest that the

posthuman is still-born.2. Similar problems undermine the supposed revolutionary or radical

nature of the technosocial space of the virtual age. Is this in fact abreak, a paradigm shift?

3. How are we to understand the liberatory potential of the posthumanor evaluative judgments that Human2.0 is better than human (or as

Elden Tyrell suggests, more human than human)? 4. What precisely are the virtues of multiplicity and/or fragmentation?

5. While in some respects the metaphor of the posthuman was con-

tained implicitly in the earliest metaphorical construction of cyber-space, in other respects it represents the disavowal of the political

implications of cyberspace contained in its earliest constructions.

Phase Three: Cyberspace PostingsTurkle: Computers now offer an experience resonant with a post-

modern aesthetic that increasingly claims the cultural privilege for-

merly assumed by modernism. (Life on the Screen)

Poster: We are moving beyond the humanist phase of history

into a new level of combination of human and machines, an ex-

tremely suggestive assemblage in which the figures of the cyborg

and cyberspace open vast unexplored territories. (Interview)

Stone: The cyborg, the multiple personality, the technosocial sub-ject, Gibsons cyberspace cowboy all suggest a radical rewriting, in

the technosocial space, of the bounded individual as the standard

social unit and validated social actant. (War of Desire)

Rheingold: The grammar of computer-mediated communication

involves a syntax of identity play: new identities, false identities,

multiple identities, exploratory identities, are available in different

manifestations of the medium. (The Virtual Community)

N. Katherine Hayles offers the following charac-

terization of the posthuman:

1. Informational pattern is privileged over mate-rial instantiation, so that embodiment in a

biological substrate is seen as an accident ofhistory rather than an inevitability of life.

2. Consciousness is an epiphenomenona, anevolutionary upstart trying to claim that it is

the whole show when in actuality it is only aminor sideshow.

3. The body is the original prosthesis we alllearn to manipulate. Extending or replacing

the body with other prostheses is a continua-

tion of a process that began before we wereborn.

4. The human being is reconfigured so that itcan be seamlessly articulated with intelligent

machines.

(How We Became Posthuman)