Sue Thomas discusses Vannevar Bush in her text, The End of Cyberspace and Other Surprises. She says that the distinction between the human and the machine, the body and the technological, is fading. We trade off that distinction every time we write an email, bid in Ebay, post on a forum, because every time we do that we allow “our data to become part of that organization’s knowledge base.” (Thomas, p.387-388)
Thomas also discusses comments made by Dion Hinchcliffe:
“One of the key aspects of Web 2.0 is that it connects people so they can effortlessly participate in fluid conversations and dynamic information sharing. At the same time, computing devices are giving people permapresence on the Web through PDAs, phones, digital cameras, and a slew of other emerging devices.
Before now, you had to consciously go to cyberspace by sitting at a PC and looking at it through a window, in essence going to a place where you primarily observed and gathered knowledge. Not any more.” (Thomas, p.388-389)
“They have the Internet on Computers now?”
For a while it was imprisoned there on the computer with limited visiting hours in a set space. But the internet is leaving the computer. Wireless networks pervade our lives. Now with the touch of a button on my mobile phone I can connect to the internet while on the bus, in a movie, during tutorials. I have easy access everywhere that I cannot escape.
1 comment:
This is making me think of Mamoru Oshii, director of Ghost in the Shell. Despite (or perhaps because of) his movie’s world-view of enhanced and engineered bodies, it turns out that Oshii isn’t so keen on technology — doesn’t have an email address, a mobile phone, or even a watch. He’s very happy with this situation. He has said:
“There is a very tiny difference between whether those tools are inside of your body or outside it. Really, it doesn’t matter. You have already become part of the machine; you have become a device."
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