New Romantic Cyborgs by Coeckelbergh Mark;

Author:Coeckelbergh, Mark;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: philosophy of technology; history of technology; Romanticism; information technology; cyborgs; science fiction; Mary Shelley; Frankenstein; human-machine systems
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2017-03-01T05:00:00+00:00

Indeed, presented with the chance to enter new, virtual worlds, people entered these worlds as social and emotional beings. They used the new worlds not to “calculate” but to have social and emotional experiences.

In The Second Self (1984) Turkle had already studied, by means of ethnography, how computers became part of our personal selves. As early as the 1980s, computers became more personal, more alive, closer to human identity and even love. The human spirit found a home in the computer culture. In her 2004 introduction, Turkle tells how she observed that many people in the computer world had “strong, even passionate relationships with digital machines,” that building and programming computers was “the most powerful intellectual and emotional experience of their lives” (1). The computer was “evocative”: in the 1970s and 1980s, computers were still “new and exciting” and evoked “strong feelings” including fear (19). In the 1980s this human spirit and this passion migrated from programmers to computer users. In the 1990s, computers became very much part of the human world, including the world of language. Today we take them for granted; Turkle even observes a certain “nonchalance” (3). And there are losses. Rather romantically (in her sense of the word), Turkle regrets that “the socially shared activity of computer programming and hardware tinkering has been displaced by playing games” (7); the pleasure of trying to understand computers is gone. (In the book, however, Turkle also presents a different picture of gaming; see the next section.) She narrates how transparent computers have been replaced by computers such as the Mac and cell phone, which are closed to users: “Culturally, the Macintosh carried the idea that it is more fruitful to explore the world of shifting surfaces than to embark on a search for mechanism, origins, and structure” (9). Indeed, today computers no longer appear as machines. They speak our language. They are more like us. But this humanization and romanticization of technology has flip side—a cost, if you wish. There is no longer a need for understanding the “mechanism, origins, and structure,” or so it seems. As I argue below, this means we no longer see them as machines at all, let alone that we are interested in their mechanism. Perhaps this means that part of the wonder is gone too, at least that kind of wonder associated with the mechanism. From what Turkle says, it seems that mechanical romanticism is dead. There is also no longer wonder concerning what used to be something new and exciting: a (desktop) computer. Most children are no longer surprised by computers in the way Turkle described in her study (33); they grow up with them. There is only nonchalance left. Or, as discussed in the previous pages, there is intimacy with the computer. (Later in this chapter I say more about Turkle’s argument that our current machines have become more intimate.)

But while generally our machines have become more intimate and human friendly, this intimation and humanization is no longer achieved within a conceptual and technological framework of simulation, especially if this means “virtual reality.

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