Kristin Scott

I made it through last semester - 14 credit hours of teaching and my own doctoral classes! My teaching load will be lightening substantially this coming semester, so hopefully I can get back to some blogging. I’m currently working on a syllabus for a class that I’m teaching in the spring entitled NCLC 350: Cybercultures (for New Century College at George Mason University). I’m excited about it because I’m teaching it as a 6 credit hour hybrid course (3 hours a week in real class; 3 hours of virtual class). Since I’ll be having my students do several assignments in Second Life, I’m working on developing the research ethics guidelines for my class, along with public disclosures, etc. I also have to get everything online (syllabus, blogs, wikis, etc.). I’ll post links when I get everything up.

I’m in deep this semester, teaching 14 credit hours and taking 7 for doctoral program, so I’ll likely not surface much until next year. Hopefully there’ll be some light (and relief) at the end of this semester. Had to do what I had to do, though. Moving is so expensive.

It’s been months since I’ve had the chance to write. The move to Virginia was exhausting and stressful, and not one piece of furniture arrived unscathed, thanks to the shitty job the movers did on the Chicago end. The drive (in a huge truck) was also much longer than I had anticipated, but in the end, we all got here safely, which is what is most important. Unpacking took two weeks, but it’s now done, and aside from a lingering exhaustion, I’m ready for school to start. I’ve already had one full day of faculty meetings; an overnight retreat begins tomorrow; more faculty meetings occur next week; and then at 7:30 a.m. on a Monday (Aug. 24th), I teach a class. Yep — 7:30 a.m. on a Monday. That’ll be a challenge.

I’ve already been assigned several readings by two of my professors and have started to dig in. I just finished reading Geertz’s “Thick Description” and “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight.” Though I’m already familiar with many of the concepts within “Thick Description,” it’s certainly useful to get a background/historical perspective on some of the earlier debates around anthropology, ethnography, and the various processes of cultural analysis, which is, of course, the point (since the class is entitled Histories of Cultural Studies). Alison Landsberg, who got her PhD at the University of Chicago (where I also attended graduate school), is teaching that class. Her bio brings to mind Lauren Berlant (thus I wonder if she worked with Berlant while at the U of C).

I’ve only recently begun to realize the significant role that Lauren and her class on embodiment played in my own research interests and intellectual development. Sometimes connections and intellectual revelations are immediate and seem to, as Susanne Langer suggests, burst upon the scene with their own powerful, clarifying force; while others often linger within the shadows, simmering within the subconscious, and only rise to the surface after they’ve been well-marinated by time (although I hate to admit it, this sounds so Freudian). The latter process is actually most powerful and lasting for me.

Well, it’s the start of summer classes, with late fall-like weather! And who knew that summer would be crazier than a regular semester? Got back from Virginia — had a successful week (minus backing into a wooden sign and busting my rear window). I’ll be teaching in the English Dept and at NCC (New Century College) at GMU this fall, which is great! Though with three classes in the evenings, I’ll be stretched to maximum capacity, I’m sure. We did sign a lease on a condo, however, so housing is set. Also was asked to do two reader reports - one for a proposed book on virtual realities at a publisher in the UK and an article for a journal in New Jersey (cyborg identities!), so I’m already working on one of those. And now I’m rushing out the door . . .

Ever since the beginning of time, or the moment in which the bodies of Adam and Eve were exposed to the shame of nakedness, humans have been struggling with issues around the organic body and its products. The organic body is messy, vulnerable, and a constant reminder of our mortality. Inherent within the organic body is death; the human race has felt powerless over the body’s power. Organic bodies are sticky and wet; they bleed, excrete, and produce tears, urine, and spit. Pus, guts, snot, vomit, sweat, and other assortments of wet gooey stuff gushes from the organic body. The organic body is penetrable, whether by another body or a material object; it has orifices, cavities, holes, and fissures in and through which the body can be infiltrated, torn, and ruptured. The organic body is vulnerable to infections, aging, scarring, disfigurement, flawed genetic coding, war, parasites, extreme temperatures, and ultimately, death. The organic body has also been encoded by gender, color, disability, class, history, DNA, geography, and sexuality. Organic bodies are dangerously virulent, capable of infecting other bodies with disease and dis-ease. Indeed, the organic body appears to be a messy, effluvial, and (self)consuming entity; an ultimate harbinger of destruction and death.

No wonder, then, that humans have ceaselessly been in search of the “ideal” body, in search of ways and methods through which to rid the organic body of all that makes it powerlessly organic. The Greeks envisaged their ideal human figure in sculpture: an idyllic structure of proper proportions. Men feared (and in many places, still do) the power of a woman’s body. The legacy of male domination is replete with ignominious and abject representations of the female body. Women could give birth, produce life; thus many feared their ability to also take life away. The woman’s body is more mysterious, its organs of reproduction and sexuality less visible, and thus more powerful in its obscurity. Therefore, the need for domination of the female body became most urgent.

Skin color has also been heavily coded. The white (and whitest) body indicative of a body unsullied, pure, innocent, and incandescent, while the black (and darkest) body is inscribed as soiled, evil, calamitous, infectious, and sullen. The colored body has inherited a history of shame, inferiority, and contempt; it is also an enigmatic body, powerful because perceived sinister, threatening in its darkness. And attempts to dominate, enslave, and render powerless the dark body saturates human history.

Within the Holocaust, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Rwanda, Bangladesh, and Darfur, human modernity culminates in the massive consumption of (sometimes less visible) bodily inscriptions that are so sinister, so contemptible, so feared, that genocide, torture, and persecution are the only means by which the body so inscribed (with such power) can be utterly destroyed.

And yet the organic body contains the power of life. It is vigorous in its consumption of desire, food, drink, and oxygen. And the organic body fiercely resists anything that threatens its survival or its genetic proliferation.

So what do we make of the virtual/digital body? A body that has now saturated the performative theater and is free from the incarceration of gender and race (for we can make the e-body anything we want); a body that has no organs, no mess, and is impenetrable? The virtual/digital body has no fluids, is not vulnerable to disease, cannot be consumed by war, and is free from physical harm. It is a body through which we can play out our most secret fantasies, upon which we can inscribe our deepest desires, with which we can confront our subconscious fears, and in which we can often locate our true identities.

The virtual/digital body is certainly not without history. Indeed, its narrative is deeply rooted within the organic body, established in myth and grounded in Utopian idealism. The image of the virtual body began as soon as we were able to put chisel to marble, paint to canvass, and hands to clay. Contemporary society is saturated with the proliferation of images of the ideal, virtual body via advertisements and the media. Indeed, the virtual body appears to be the final solution to the problem of the organic body. But is it?

Many of us believe we are finally escaping all of the mal associations of the organic body with the advent of the virtual (and technological/cyborg) body. On the contrary, the virtual/digital body serves to continually remind, reinforce and further highlight the limitations of the organic body, because it continually reminds us of what our organic bodies are not. We are both fearful and envious of the virtual body.

The virtual body is the consequence of our dis-eased history, an ideological manifestation that is simultaneously visible and invisible, real and virtual, empowered and disempowered, present and absent. The virtual body acts as a sort of inscribed tabula rasa, appearing, on the surface to be empty and devoid of narrative, though heavily encoded by its mere presence.

I had complained, a few weeks ago, about one of the elements of Shyftr, a new social RSS reader:

“I’d like to see them add some kind of search engine that hunts down the needed rss or atom feed once you’ve indicated the website. Bloglines has this feature, which I like very much — keeps me from having to hunt and peck and click into infinity searching for the right bloody url.”

I’m happy to report that they fixed this! Now all you have to do is put the blog url in the search box, and presto! I’m not an advanced web designer, but now I’m wondering if it’s at all possible to just type in a blogger’s name and have a search engine pop up possible matching blogs (and then you could just click on whichever one you want)? Could the search link be attached to a google search of blogs in that name?

They are also creating a new blogger’s directory (a “guide to user blogs” according to Shyftr team member, Andy Suggs), which will be cool. I did find searching for other Shyftr blogs a bit cumbersome, so that’d be a great addition. I hope to get more into the reader when final exams are over, but so far, I’m pleased that the team is responsive to comments.

Now . . . back to grading.

Could nanoworms prove to be the cure for cancer? Here’s an interesting article from UC San Diego’s News Center that suggests that we may be heading in that direction.

Excerpt: “Their discovery, detailed in this week’s issue of the journal Advanced Materials, is reminiscent of the 1966 science fiction movie, the Fantastic Voyage, in which a submarine is shrunken to microscopic dimensions, then injected into the bloodstream to remove a blood clot from a diplomat’s brain.”

Yet another example of science fiction’s ability to foresee future events.

I’ve been aware and vaguely familiar with the terms posthumanism and transhumanism, but have not yet had an opportunity to explore either in any depth. From what I gather so far (and I admit to being a newbie to both concepts), becoming transhuman seems to be a necessary first step to becoming posthuman. The prefixes certainly suggest that order — “trans” describing the evolution of the transition of human into a being that is either augmented by or totally transitioned into a technologically-based being, thus describing the process; whereas,”post” describes the result or the “possible future” condition of beings to “radically exceed those of present humans as to be no longer unambiguously human by our current standards” (Bostrom - The Transhumanist FAQ).

Of course, all that is somewhat fluid, open to interpretation, and certainly fodder for much more discussion. The World Transhumanist Organization, for example, writes that transhumanism:

“advocates the ethical use of technology to expand human capacities. We support the development of and access to new technologies that enable everyone to enjoy better minds, better bodies and better lives. In other words, we want people to be better than well.“

But of course, who is to say what “better” means? Do our current or future “standards” of “better” include any specific (conscious or unconscious) alterations or augmentations to race, ethnicity, sex, or other physical differences? Bostrom suggests that transhumanism is “compatible with a variety of ethical systems,” but whose ethics? He offers the following paragraph as descriptive of the common beliefs of most transhumanists:

“According to transhumanists, the human condition has been improved if the conditions of individual humans have been improved. In practice, competent adults are usually the best judges of what is good for themselves. Therefore, transhumanists advocate individual freedom, especially the right for those who so wish to use technology to extend their mental and physical capacities and to improve their control over their own lives.”

But again, all of that is ambiguous enough to be open to multiple interpretations. In any case, transhumanism seems to be a fairly powerful movement, while posthumanism provides the ultimate (and quite Utopic) vision for the future.

Ah, if Aldous Huxley were here to see us now . . .

Lots more to learn, though — I’m just starting to scratch the surface. If anyone has any great reading recommendations, I’d be happy to hear them!

I have to admit, I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with social networking. On the one hand, as a child of the 60s, I’m both continually amazed, impressed, and excited about all the social networking capabilities that I didn’t have growing up. It’s like being a kid all over again, except without all the teenage angst and melodrama (whew — don’t miss those days!). And I have been able to keep up with my friends and family better — if through nothing more than their frequent status updates. And in some cases, I actually learn more about people than I ever would have otherwise.

Case and Point: my brother and sister (both of whom are 26/25 years younger than I, respectively) were pretty much just figments of my imagination until Facebook. Since they live in NYC and I have been living in Chicago, I’ve only gotten to see them every few years — measuring their growth in terms of body parts in photographs (here, they’re just up past my waist — and here, they’ve sprouted to my chin!). I tried to create some sort of relationship with them over the years, as best as I could with 25-26 years and 850 miles between us. I tried writing letters (never a single response), I tried calling (a few sentences spoken here or there - and absolutely no response to cell phone calls or even text messages), and I tried emailing (never a reply!). Then last year, I got on Facebook, hunted them down, and befriended my unknown blood relatives. Now they post on my wall, send photos, and IM me through facebook. I’m actually getting to know them a bit . . . their hobbies, likes, dislikes, etc. And the constant status updates and photo/video additions keep me up to date on their daily lives. I have formed a relationship with them . . . but only with a social networking site as a medium.

I’ve also been able to stay in touch with previous students, keep up with colleagues (lots of faculty going online), and of course, maintain a consistent web presence and active scholarly engagement within my field of study. In fact, it’s this love/hate relationship that has driven me to study social networking, the various modes of cyber-embodiment, and the ways in which technology impacts and reflects our culture. I’m fascinated with all of it. And as one who was once a student of literature and language, I cannot help but be equally as fascinated with the emergence of a new lexicon.

But I also miss the f2f contact, which seems to diminish in both quantity and quality with each high-tech year. Sure, I probably make some sort of connection with at least 50-100 people on a daily basis via technology, but aside from the interactions I have with students in classes or around campus, I don’t actually get much qualitative time with friends anymore. And if I do, it’s usually through the fruits of much labor. First, there’s the multiple emails of inquiry (all those “let’s set a date” “no really, we should” “call me sometime to” and “really, we have to get together” emails); another handful of messages to actually set a date/time; and the all too often and almost seemingly inevitable emails and texts to reschedule or change that date/time to yet another. In the end, after a few weeks, sometimes even months, the date is made and f2f contact occurs — for an hour or slightly more — because both parties, of course, have yet another meeting, appointment, errand, or whatchamajigger to get to.

I long for the days when folks just dropped in or a group of us would get together for a spontaneous cook-out, or go out for drinks on a whim. I’m not saying technology is the cause of that decline in real-time social networking, but I do think it contributes. And it’s a major time-suck, too. I can spend hours upon hours in front of the damned computer — loving it and hating it. Dying to get away from it, yet unable to fully pull myself out of the cybervortex. And with each new method of social networking, whether online or mobile, I get sucked in even deeper.

Ok, I’ve been on Twitter now for about two weeks, and I think I have the hang of it now. At first, Twitter seemed rather overly-simplistic (the page layout is very basic); it certainly lacks any aesthetic appeal - aside from offering the ability to change background color, it can’t be personalized. But after having tweaked my twitter a bit, adding both IM and mobile devices, for example, I can better appreciate the application.

After having used Facebook now for a while, Twitter at first seemed like a slightly higher-grade, status update program (Kristin is: tweaking my twitter). And to some degree, that’s pretty much what it is — each twitter entry can be up to 140 words (one long or two short sentences), so there’s not much else you can do but write very brief updates or send a link or two for others to peruse. It also offers updates to devices (cell phone and/or IM), so that you can receive constant updates of those you are following. Of course, I would imagine that this could become quite overwhelming and quickly intrusive if you are following a lot of folks). But I think it’s easier to follow random people that you just find interesting, whether professionally or personally.

With Facebook, you have to have a profile, be affiliated with a school or group, and so its less likely that you’ll befriend someone you don’t already have a connection to (even if it is through six degrees). Twitter allows you to search by terms (i.e. culture) and browse members you might like to follow (much like how many people choose blog feeds to follow). I’ve seen it used as a professional updating system (i.e. a colleague of mine will post links to conferences, musings on teaching, or new software/technological applications) and for personal/social reasons, such as just updating friends and followers on daily philosophical musings, experiences, events, and so forth. Most I know on Twitter (not many yet) do both. The most cool thing for me is the ability to text a short update from my cell phone that then shows up on the website (and/or to others devices, if they have them turned on).

And then there’s Mambo . . . no, not the dance, but the open source content management system (CMS) that can serve a number of different functions. So far, that’s about all I know . . . I’ve downloaded the system to my domain, as well, and will spend the next several weeks (perhaps even months) determining how it might be of use. While it can be used for a blog, it’s a lot more complex than a blog, though from initial impressions, it doesn’t seem to difficult to manage. I’ve not yet done anything to it, but you can see how the system/structure is set up by going to my mambo: http://kristinscott.net/mambo. I’d love to see how others are using it. If you have a mambo website you’d like to share, I’d be really interested in seeing it!