10th week summary

This class, we learned about HUMAN. first, we saw last time subject about computer game. media as extensions or prostheses, All media are extensions of some human faculty. and we learned about ratio of the senses, and 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. and what is 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. and then this is a outline for today.

• identity and cyborgs: identity and affinity
–what is a cyborg?
A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. ... By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs –Haraway, p. 516

•a comparison of
–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

–biopolitics; and,
It is a “premonition” because the technology assumed by Foucault in his analysis of “populations,” “demographics” and other means of describing and differentiating groups of people is a technology of the last few centuries. Cyborg politics is engaged with contemporary technologies.

–cyborg politics
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.

–who is Donna Haraway?
Experience
–Professor of the History of Consciousness, UCSC
–Assistant Professor of the History of Science, Johns Hopkins University
–Lecturer, Women Studies and History of Science, University of Hawai’i
Education
–Ph.D., Biology, Yale University
–B.A., Zoology; B.A., Literature; B.A., Philosophy

this time, we learned about human and cyborg. Is cyborg human or machine? I think... have a think and sentiment... is a human. if cyborg have a think and sentiment, also cyborg is a kind of a human.