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 popular conceptions of cyberspace have been shaped by three dominant metaphoric constructions (place-based metaphors, cyberspace-as-mind, and the post human). Both individually and collectively these constructions reveal significant tensions and i nadequacies, especially in their implications for our understanding of human nature and subjectivity. These inadequacies are apparent 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 info rmal public places where people can rebuild the aspects of community that were lost when the malt shop became a mall. (Rheingold, The Virtual Community) Blacksburg Electronic Village: Were providing an analogue of the old general store front porch. (Andrew Cohill) CyberTimes: If the Web is a community, think of th is as its town square.In a world as complex as the Web, its reassuring to know there 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 distinctly different 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 create. (Vice President Gore) Problems With Place-Based Metaphors Tensions within this metaphor ultimately destabilize place-based constructions of cyberspace. A technology implicated in the dissolution 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 Packard Bells advertising campaign Wouldnt you rather be at home?, created by M&C Saatchi, which counterposes a dytopian urban nightmare to the perfection of suburbia. Mel Ransom, VP of Marketing: We want to educate the public that many tasks which at one time required a person to leave the house can be done from the comfort of their home with a Packard Bell PC. Cyberspace guarantees that we will never have to leave our suburban dreamlands and risk encounter with the other.

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being 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 Phase Two Cyberspace as Nonspace of the Mind Early attempts to conceptualize cyberspace as a kind of place gave way to cyberspace as an oppositional space of mind. In technology, economics, and the politics of nations, wealth in 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 Cyberspace, 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 transfo rmation 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) 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 children, shedding the limitations of the body and downloading our selves into cyberspace. Being digital is being disembodied, becoming pure mind. In the nonspace of the mind that is cyberspace, 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 construction 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 traditional 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.

No ambition, however extravagant, no fantasy, however 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 external realitythe physical worldbut also, and much more portentously, ourselves. You can become whatever you want to be. Ed Regis: Meet the Extropians Phase Three: Cyberspace Postings Turkle: Computers now offer an experience resonant with a postmodern aesthetic that increasingly claims the cultural privilege formerly 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 extremely suggestive assemblage in which the figures of the cyborg and cyberspace open vast unexplored territories. (Interview) Stone: The cyborg, the multiple personality, the technosocial subject, 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)
From the perspective of this third phase, previous constructions of cyberspace are wedded to an outmoded modern, Enlightenment framework. Cyberspace in fact has wrought a complete break with these older modernist and Cartesian frameworks and, as Stone argues, gives rise to new collective structures and gives new meanings to agency, identity, the body, and community. She describes this new technosocial space as a cyborg habitat composed of emergent technologies, shifting boundaries, optional embodiments, where the social space becomes computer code (37-38). Cyberspace is portrayed less as a tool and more as a social space where inhabitants of MUDs and MOOs create multiple, fragmented, decentered selves. Cyber-theorists such as Poster, Mark Taylor, Donna Haraway and Jay David Bolter, as well as popular press authors such as Kevin Kelly (Wired), Jaron Lanier, and Max More (the Extropians) argue that the uses of new informational technologies are leading to the emergence of a new networked, non-hierarchical, relational culture in which traditional boundaries between human and machine, nature and culture, are blurred if not radically rewritten.

N. Katherine Hayles offers the following characterization of the posthuman: 1. Informational pattern is privileged over material instantiation, so that embodiment in a biological substrate is seen as an accident of history rather than an inevitability of life. 2. Consciousness is an epiphenomenona, an evolutionary upstart trying to claim that it is the whole show when in actuality it is only a minor sideshow. 3. The body is the original prosthesis we all learn to manipulate. Extending or replacing the body with other prostheses is a continuation of a process that began before we were born. 4. The human being is reconfigured so that it can be seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines. (How We Became Posthuman )

Problems with the Post 1. 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 a break, a paradigm shift? 3. How are we to understand the liberatory potential of the posthuman or evaluative judgments that Human2.0 is better than human (o r 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 contained implicitly in the earliest metaphorical construction of cyberspace, in other respects it represents the disavowal of the political implications of cyberspace contained in its earliest constructions.