I know that several of you are currently working on book and dissertation projects (you all know who you are). I am trying to get my book to make some sense, but part of the problem is that the subject I'm talking about (posthuman persuasion) seems to get in the way of the very act of writing an extended analysis.
A little context might be in order. On Thursday, I went to see the President of Adobe (he is a graduate of Bowling Green State U.) discuss how his company is trying to implement Web 2.0 application strategies. I was pretty happy with his acknowledgment that much of what is happening with Web 2.0 is an attempt to correct much of the top-down perspectives imposed by early iterations of the Net and its protocols. I was also happy to hear him acknowledge that there is too much "push content" pulling at user attention to make the Net, well...useful. This distributed cognition and cynical focus on visual stimulus has not only left us a bit wired, it has also fundamentally changed our embodied experience.
So...while I still have a ton of hacks and workarounds for mitigating and steering this bowl of visual pop rocks (with Code Red poured over it, of course--or maybe not), I find it difficult to maintain a specfic focus or frame for analysis. I can toggle quickly, but I find it tough to believe in the pre-posthuman stance I need to maintain to fulfill the textual requirements of a codex book.
Weird, huh?
2 comments:
Two books I'm teaching this semester might be of help if you don't know of them yet:
Kate Hayle My Mother Was a Computer
Matthew Fuller Media Ecologies
The posthuman is the metaphoric state when subjectivity is not individualistic - but based on intermediations or networked connections (for good or for bad). The connection for Tech Comm is there, as I see it, but I don't know enough of what goes on right now in Tech Comm to comment if others do as well.
Thanks Jeff. I'm going to get Hayles "Mother" book. I'm also looking at some other cyborg stuff.
Haven't read the Fuller yet, but I'll definitely be looking that over as well.
thanks!
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