Kathryn's Reflective Blogging Post

Blogging as a part of this unit I think has been quite important. If it hadn’t been involved in the course, some people would never have made a post in their lives on anything, making me think it would have been difficult for them to fully engage with the webblogging topics we covered.
For my part, blogger and I shall never be friends. Give me livejournal, deadjournal, anything but blogger. Having to validate your humanity with every post gets irritating (the word verification to make sure you’re not a spamming-advertising-machine). The layout is uncomfortable (small writing) and uncustomiseable. Additionally, there is only a temporally descending display of posts, while posting on a messageboard for example would allow some categorization of the different sorts of posts.

Am I a cyborg? I would meet all the criteria by the majority this unit’s readings. And unlike many others in this unit, my dependence on technology is at the level where (for medical reasons) I would not function without it. However, despite all this, I feel the biological, material aspect of my identity dominates and is so demanding (wanting feeding, causing pain, etc) that it sidelines the mechanical. If I am a cyborg, it is not enough! The constant physical limitations are too distracting to embrace a functional cyborg identity – perhaps in the future further cyborgization will solve this? I’m reminded of dog-identity, where its commonly thought that a cross-breeding often results in offspring having the best qualities of both parents. Or the philosophy behind the Borg, where incorporating as much of everything into their culture is the Borg way to achieve perfection. Or the Mesoamerican incorporation of the Christian god as another element into the supernatural pantheon already populated by foreign deities (“The devil and the saints in the conquest of Mexico”, by Fernando Cervantes). I think part of my response is best expressed through an understanding of the anime Lain (1998), where Lain creates an identity for herself with no basis on anything material. Eventually, finding this identity preferable, she changes to exist only in The Wired (the internet) and as a cyborg with equal distribution between machine and biological identity, she deletes her physical identity (in both its machine and biological forms). So you can’t have a cyborg where you just keep adding machine to human, there needs to be some loss of humanity accompanying the process. As I have always known myself to act at the same level of humanity, cyborg conceptuality is difficult to accept. If all people are like this, shouldn't "cyborg" be assimilated into the umbrella of "human"?

One thing I particularly liked about this course was its overlap with science fiction, and the understandings that can be reached through use of pop culture.