INI303H1 Chapter Notes - Chapter 3: Bruno Latour, Posthumanism, Podcast
Hayles
- Posthumanism: deconstruction of liberal humanist subject and the attributes associated
- Autonomy, free will, self determination
- Robotics has no capacity to reconstruct the complexity of human brain and its relation to
the body and its surroundings
- Does not believe in downloading a human personality within the next 50 years
- Life expectancy is not just technological, but also social, political, economic
- In liberal-humanist tradition, agency is seen to reside primarily in the individual subject
- In technological regime, human agency cannot be in isolation from systems with which
we are in constant and constitutive interaction
- Agency is just an illusion
- Agency is distributed among both human and non-human entities —Bruno
Latour
- New field of materialism → how technological, biological, social processes
channel human action
- Hyper attention: requires constant gratification; enables quick scans of significant amounts of
data to gain an overview or identify patterns
- Deep = high threshold for boredom, engage in tasks or problems over extended time for
development of knowledge
- Ubiquity of networked devices created a socio-technical environment privileging hyper
attention
- As digital technologies become more woven into the fabric of everyday life, a neat division
between human and non human actors and agencies becomes more complex
- Introduction of ipad to kindergarteners wires children's brains toward hyper attention at an age
characterised by high degrees of neural plasticity
- New technologies help tap into the reservoir of knowledge, creativity and insights
- Humanities can cultivate deep attention (close reading)
- The unconscious…
- Filters out irrelevant information to avoid information overload
- Recognises patterns
- Draws inferences
- Adjudicates between conflicting and ambiguous information
- Provides new insights on the various affinities and commonalities shared with animals
and technical systems
The Death of Blogging (Jodi Dean)
- By 2009, 70% of bloggers said they blogged about brands
- Brand atachment as a primary goal = conceit of authenticity
- Podcasting, photoblogging and vlogging (replacements)
- Blog killers: Facebook (networking sites) twitter (microblogging)
- Social netork prioritize connection to others over reliance on persona (blogs)
