Aislinn Raftis

Digital Rhetoric
Professor Ristow
Critical Response 3
I was most interested in Nayars chapter 2 sections on cyberpunk
and the intersection of science fiction and reality. Science fiction in
popular culture is represented as dark, scary, and a dangerous, almost
primitive place. Books and movies like A Clockwork Orange, Star Wars,
1984, Oryx and Crake, Edge of Tomorrow, and many others all show a
kind of dystopia or a real world that has regressed. It is interesting for
me, at least, to see how we culturally imagine huge technological
advancements to set us back to a more savage and primitive mindset.
The textbook focuses heavily on the body and the obsoleteness of the
body. The manifestation they describe is the cyborg, but McLuhan
complicates this by talking about networks as an extension of the
human nervous system. Cyborgs conflate the theory of human body
extension with the practical reality of prosthetics and mechanical
limbs.
Nayar included a sentence in a parenthetical that illuminated a
certain way of thinking for me. The parenthetical said, virtual actually
means potential, awaiting actualization: so virtual life is awaiting
corpo-realization (57). I had never thought of virtual worlds or actions
in this manner before. Growing up we are taught that everything we
put online is there forever, it will continue to follow us around. We are
taught to safeguard our privacy online and so I tend to conflate the

online world with the real world because online actions have off-line
consequences. Giving a physical body to the endless, uncontrollable
world of the Internet has also probably influenced the way we culturally
view the advancements with digital technology.
Again focusing on the body, we currently are able to hold
technology. We can hold our smartphones, our laptops, our hardware
that gives us access to the online worlds. The prosthetic limbs are
strapped onto us. It raises the question, is this what seperates us from
the non-human robots? That we are still distinct from technology and
able to hold it, or it holds us, but we are not one and the same.
The book was interesting because it made me think about the
intersections of the human body and technology in new ways that I
had never thought of before.