Class for 08.05.14~16

Class for 08.05.14~16






This class' topic is human.
Media as mirrors versus media as prostheses. Medium as mirror - we see “ourselves” in the medium. Medium as prosthesis - we are radically altered by a medium.
A definition of media studies. Media studies is the theory and practice of exploring how people and things are connected, reflected, extended, reconfigured, and separated by technologies and techniques. Media as mirrors and machinations, prostheses.
Digital media studies is a kind of media studies that pays especial attention to the techniques and technologies of computers and computer networks.
Mediation: how are we connected/separated? Hypertexts, networks, documentary method and identification (or even, “more than identification”), prostheses/extensions, Haraway’s proposals.
Physical-non-physical (e.g., molecular-scale machines of electromagnetism and light).
Identity and cyborgs: identity and affinity. What is a cyborg? Democratic, liberal politics; identity politics; biopolitics; and, cyborg politics.
Democratic, liberal politics. One of the good assumptions about democratic politics: we are all equal (i.e., “universal man”) . One of the unrealistic assumptions about democratic politics: we are all equal (i.e., “universal man”). Race, class, gender, sexuality, and a set of other social, political, cultural and economic differences separate us.
We talked background. Gender: who is a woman? who is a man? Race: who is black? who is white? Sexuality: who is straight? who is gay? Class: who is rich? who is poor?
Biopolitics: politics carried out through the means, the techniques and technologies of health and illness, statistics, the census, epidemiology and demography, the science of race, eugenics, population, abortion, genomics, and new reproductive technologies.
Mythology: A fabled fire-breathing monster of Greek mythology, with a lion's head, a goat's body, and a serpent's tail (or according to others with the heads of a lion, a goat, and a serpent), killed by Bellerophon.
From one perspective, a cyborg world is about the final imposition of a grid of control on the planet, about the final abstraction embodied in a Star Wars apocalypse waged in the name of defense, about the final appropriation of women’s bodies in a masculinist orgy of war.
From another perspective, a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints.
We have a means of short-circuiting differences of identity and institutional boundaries.
Cyborg politics is the struggle for language and the struggle against perfect communication, against the one code that translates all meaning perfectly, the central dogma of phallogocentrism.
One of the means to (re)connect people is through (re)coding systems because coded systems have become a means for defining who we are on a biological-level;
And also it’s no accident that the vocabulary of contemporary, molecular biology sounds like the vocabulary of computers: they were invented at about the same time.
The cyborg is a kind of disassembled and reassembled, post-modern collective and personal self. This is the self feminists must code.
Donna Haraway.
He is Professor of the History of Consciousness, UCSC and ssistant Professor of the History of Science, Johns Hopkins University also lecturer, Women Studies and History of Science, University of Hawai’i.
MUD stands for multi-user domain. MOO stands for MUD.





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I'm intereated in this part, human and cyborg through this class.




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