Helen’s Ethnography Blog

Beauty as luring us into our own destruction
Can we override our aesthetic responses? When we find something beautiful can we deny its beauty? Beauty is only up to the person who is judging it. “Beauty is different than other feelings.”

Why did you choose the look of your avatar: Beauty, ugliness, iconic, attention grabbing? What avatar do you think is the most beautiful? Why do you think that? Can you see the beauty in other Avatars that maybe at first you didn’t find beautiful?
Foglets are robots that have no physical needs.

Our Avatars have no physical needs (unlike something like the SIMS where the SIM can’t survive without the essentials and is only happy if we fulfill it emotionally and physically. In this way, a SIM is in 3rd person. We as humans behind the avatars have emotional needs in order to be personally happy. Our virtual selves are not self-sufficient robots.
Ribofunk,
Having the ability to engage in real-world activities, such as sex, drugs, street gangs, groups.
Show how we have the ability to do this is Second Life.
We are not confined to physical space any longer. We can meet in virtual worlds, with virtual times, people in the same place form different times of the world. We can have virtual meetings across the world, and even communicate and interact with each other in a time that exists different from both parties, a time that is made up in the virtual world. It could be 9am where I am and 9pm where someone else is, but we could meet in midday virtual world.
This brings us together, gives us the ability to be connected even though across the globe we are totally disconnected. We may or may not really know the person on the other end; but we are in the same space at the same time in the virtual world. Is it easier to be yourself in a virtual space? I think that it is. I let me guard down and feel like I can say anything regardless of who or what the other avatar is. I take comfort in knowing that the other person doesn’t know me, but at the same time it is also easier for me to interact even when I know the person. Does anyone else feel that way? Could you be friends with someone in a virtual world and not in the real world?
The network itself speaks back to us.
Access to network depends on physical location.
Where the global and financial elite gather.
“Standing still is the kiss of death and networking is a never ending job.” In the corporate world, the big shots and bosses make the employees feel insecure so that they try their hardest all the time to be good at their job. Choose profit over pleasure.
What does this mean in terms of networking?
“Optimized transience disorientation” is a condition in networks and the workplace. *Feeling overwhelmed by the information overwhelmed by information. “You can’t get rid of old information fast enough to accommodate the new”.
Think about why we need so much stimulation. It’s like we crave it now, to pack in as much information as we possibly can into our minds. We have short attention spans—is this due to our inability to pay attention to one thing because our brains are overloaded? Shaviro says “this is the price of being connected”—why do you think that Shaviro makes overlaod of information a negative thing?
Referring to Noir, Shaviro talks about McNihil “son of nothing” who has lenses that translate everything he sees from an over stimulated networked society to 1940’s equivalents, but not in a virtual reality kind of way—he still communicates with and lives in a real society, he just sees it differently than what it actually is, as a film Noir. A grey scale, black and white, simple world out of the past without a networked society. No loud colors or flashy advertisements, nothing jumping out and trying to catch your attention.
What do you think it would be like to live in a world like that? And, by the way, I hate film Noir, so when Shaviro says we, I am in complete disagreement.
Film noir takes us out of the networked society because the main character is someone who is out of the system. Someone who may be “noble or corrupt” but removed from the system nonetheless.
In Blade Runner, the replicants are simulacra, but feel pain in a simulated world nonetheless. (I have never seen Bladerunner)
Looking for The Edge outside of the network. In this sense, noir becomes where everybody is connected, the darkness, the betrayal–the “shadow” of the noir.
There is a connection between debt and death. Death is an escape from debt, and when the debtor dies, the belongings or assets of the debtor go to the collector. This relationship is inverted in a networked society, where not even death can get rid of debt. This means that debt is an escape form death, that no matter what, including dying you cannot escape from debt. It does not just erase or go away. It is forever embedded in your life.
We never finish anything. Everything is changing so rapidly that there is not even a moment to catch up on anything that you owe.
In American culture especially, we are expected to be on the go all the time, and because of this, we never get anything fully and completely done. This is an issue that does not extend cross culturally it seems. Is this concept a network-connectedness issue or an American issue?
Debt is limitless.
Can we say then, that no matter how much debt you are in you will always be indebt and any amount of debt is just the existence of it? Is this to say that everyone is in debt and has to pay back something, so why don’t well all just be in debt together? Most people are in debt their entire lives. And if when we die, we still can’t get rid of it, who cares? I think it’s more of a source of anxiety than anything else, and actually I have come to terms with my debt issues, and realized why not just pay 100 dollars a month to continue debt and all the while spend more to be more in debt. It may sound stupid, but for right now it’s all I can do. Debt is limitless, and I can still only pay the monthly fees. This is also touched upon when Shaviro talks about Children of Production and The Tendential Fall of the Rate of Profit, in relation to Vampires and Zombies.

Children of Production & The Tendential Fall of the Rate of Profit
Vampires and bloodsuckers—relating back to the beginning of the book when Shaviro talks about the bed bugs and the symbiosis of humans and parasites. “No predator can live in the absence of prey”.
If this is true, than no matter what, debt will go on because we humans exist. The debt-vampire will never die, even when we die, the vampire is still living on our blood money it has sucked out of us and we can’t do anything about it. And just to draw this analogy further, the vampire will come after my entire family even after I die.

Drawing on the rate of profit, a “corporation cannot fully reach its potential profit” because the more efficient something becomes, the more profitable it is, but then there is more potential for large decline.

Fade Away and Radiate (179 & The Whole World is Watching (180)
WHETHER YOU PARTICIPATE OR NOT, YOU ARE A PART OF THE NETWORK
Shaviro talks about how people who do not directly participate in a network are still close enough to be affected.
Is this referring to putting people in target groups?
“Whatever appears on the television screen is a raw experience for those who watch it, therefore television is reality, and reality is less than television.”
*Contest this. Reality is not less than telelvision.

Exhibitionists vs. The Silent Masses: The silent masses are unaware that they are being watched, and the exhibitionists present the spectacle to be watched.
Comparison of Micky-san in the book Red Spider, White Web to being on Ecstasy. Are drugs like technology? Extensions of ourselves as McLuhan suggests? Do you think that it’s extreme to say that the way that drugs affect our bodies the same way that television and other media do?
There are different levels of reality, of existence when you are on drugs. It’s totally virtual, if you want to consider virtual as being something that’s not real. The feelings on drugs aren’t real no matter how much we want them to be. I can’t say though that the long-term affects are the same (have you seen Celebrity Rehab?) Actually, isn’t there a help line for people who become too obsessed with VR games?

First of all, this reading has been my favorite thus far. Shaviro cites Boudrillard, Focault. Burroughs, Deleuze, and I can actually make sense of what he is talking about. In all honesty, though I respect the research and writings of those media and communication theorists, I have always had a hard time reading their research. So, I’d like to thank Shaviro for putting all this stuff in layman’s terms. (Or maybe I have just been so inundated with “difficult” reading that I finally get it? Am I the only one who thinks this?)

Parasitism—interesting to say the least. I found myself totally creeped out; I am sure others felt this way too, but I have recently had an encounter with bugs that have come to know me quite intimately, so intimate in fact that we sleep together every night. Yup, bed bugs. So the thought of me and the bed bugs being in love, well I doubt that could ever happen. But, that intimacy does exist. They yearn for my blood, wait for me to sleep and then feed on me without me knowing it until I wake up in the morning with welts and bumps. At least I can’t feel it. Wait, this sounds more like being slipped the date-rape drug and taken advantage of. In the end, like the parasites Shaviro talks about, namely in “Bloodchild”, this also could never work out between me and the bed bugs, and eventually one of us has to go. The emotional distraught and anger I feel toward the bed bugs has led me to an exterminator, in fact coming tomorrow. Maybe this is like court, the exterminator is the lawyer. Or maybe the exterminator is the police coming to investigate the situation and my landlord is the lawyer. Ok, well I am getting off topic. So how does this relate to information and being connected in a networked society?

A networked society cannot work without information. Information is gathered by various media, and then spit back out at us. I suppose we could think that blood-sucking vermin take our blood (information), digest (process) it, and then multiply (hit us harder with even more mediated messages). The next time around, there are more blood-suckers (mediated messages) that are able to take more out of us. This reminds me of the hypodermic needle principle, which it seems like to me Shaviro doesn’t particularly agree with, and neither do I. We can choose what we want to see and what we want to hear and then decide what we want to do with it. The influence comes from what is inside of us, and if the media are lucky, they can persuade us. Parasites only persuade me to freak out and get rid of them. Media, advertising in particular, that try to target me, especially television, causes me to freak out, get TiVo and fast-forward through the commercials. Real quick—does it worry anyone that we put these boxes in our homes? That our cable boxes connect us to a satellite and give us movies? Is this magic or a way to get into our homes and watch us? I think this is where surveillance becomes an issue, and out of surveillance comes networks. TiVo and cable boxes aren’t the only things collecting our data, and as Shaviro puts it, we ourselves have become data. Are we not human anymore?

I wrote in a past blog that I was quite disturbed with Hayles’ notion of the posthuman. Shaviro has made me rethink this. If the posthuman means that we are data according to the media, I completely agree. The media leave the human aspect out of everything. Even our emotions have become information that is used in order to make us do something, buy something, want to be something. They may target an emotion in order to get a response, but there is a whole equation on how to do this and we are the variables in the equation. This makes us a network, puts us on a grid to be pinpointed. I think when I responded to the Hayles reading I was concerned that Hayles was insinuating that we were all going to become robots one day. In the eyes of the media, we are robots, and they are attempting to control us. But again, as humans, we have the decision to be controlled or not controlled. What makes us connected and in a network is that we are all in it together and all on the same grid, experimented with in the same equations.

Being in a network, our lives have become less private, and I think that most of us, especially the younger generations, have just accepted this.  For some reason, I don’t really care what is private unless it is going to expose some horrible secret about me that would ruin my reputation. I wrote a paper for a former class about MySpace and Facebook, and a part of it was about the reasons why we would want to subject ourselves to public scrutiny. I focused on the acceptance of “friendship” and allowing people to post comments on your “wall”, and what that says about you. That the networks we form in these online communities expose who we are not just through the formulation of personal profiles, but through what other people are able to do on your profiles such as leave comments and tag photos. We allow this to happen, and somewhere in our minds, we are ok with this, and through my research (and I come from a communication background) I hypothesized that since we are human, we desire acceptance and create meaning out of symbols and language, which translate from what other people in online communities say about us. The fact that our lives are less private doesn’t phase us because it makes us feel more accepted.  Going back to surveillance, we are connected and networked because we don’t care if we are exposed.  Being exposed brings us together. Isn’t that what we want as a society anyway?

Hillis cites a few different ways that people use their avatars as a “middle voice”, making their avatars a piece of who they are. In this essay he says that according to Thomas Hobbes, avatars are like the characters that authors write about in books. The author knows the character like he knows himself. I agree with this to some extent, but not everyone who creates an avatar is an author. Sure, Hobbes’ probably doesn’t want us to take this literally, but maybe a person who creates an avatar creates them because they don’t know anything about who their avatar is; it’s not symbolic of them at all, it’s a curiosity that exists, and through the avatar, one can learn about that type of person of lifestyle that they have heard about in real life, and have never actually hung out with someone like that or met them. I think this could go for groups as well, to join a group as an avatar to learn about the customs and culture of that group. Because what everyone else sees on the outside of an avatar, no one really knows if you are a part of that culture or not. Maybe you’re the quiet one in the corner of the cyber room, or maybe you’ve googled ways to be able to interact with the other members. Maybe this becomes fascinating to you and you decide to stay around as that character in that group longer than you had anticipated. But the point is, this wasn’t a part of you at all and you couldn’t just sit down with a pen and paper (well, actually, a keyboard and a monitor) to begin writing about these characters that are assumed to be a part of you. As Hillis notes, this is one possible way that people use avatars, but not all people use them in this way.

I agree with Roy Pascal when he says that the author of a book or text can use his characters to submerge himself in them, and that the author is also not subjective, or at least according to the readers. Most authors (at least it seems with books that I have read by the same author) write books that have the same theme and the reader expects the author to live up to the same steamy details, horror, or comedy that they had read before. This is after all how authors become popular. An avatar, at least in Second Life, can be a completely unexpected character, can become something else, change it’s total identity with the exception of a name. If an author was to write about that character, it sounds more like a soap opera where the ghost of someone else possesses an actor. The name is the same, but the character is totally different.

What happens when an avatar changes his or her identity with the expectation that he or she is the same as before? Once established in a group, I would expect that the avatar makes friends, online appointments to meet with them, chat, and engage in whatever rituals they usually engage in. At this point, the author of the avatar who made up this story for the avatar actually becomes the character for the duration that they are online. This is like Hillis’ comparison to avatars being more like a attendees of various masquerades, trying on different masks for the reaction of other people also trying on different masks. (This can also include fetishes and curiosities, although fetishism is more of a representation of the self than a curiosity.)

There is no way that an author of a novel can become their characters. Once the book is published it is out of their hands. The only comparison I can make, again, is that it is expected that the author produce similar content time and time again, just like an avatar is expected to return to his or her cyber life as the same character time and time again.

The Internet is supposed to be a place where we can roam freely without policing. These airwaves, so to speak, are for us to move around freely in cyber world, but at the same time we have to pay for the service to use it. I understand that there are certain websites that we have to pay for or services within websites, but shouldn’t we have free access to the web? Why do certain cafes allow us to access it for free, but they pay for it? And then others—I won’t mention the chain of coffee shops that exists on every single corner of New York City–capitalize on us humans who think that paying an arm and a leg for coffee and using an Internet hotspot is worth the charge. Can we just stop for a minute and think about the fact that we are being charged to use the airwaves? We already have to buy the computer and the technology to access the Internet. And now we have to pay a monthly fee? What a freaking rip off.
I want to first thank all of the local coffee shops that so selflessly thank their customers for their patronage by not only putting in that extra pump of caramel free of charge, but also offer free Internet.  I don’t think the coffee shop should have to pay for the service, but at least they are making it easier on their customers.
So speaking of having to pay for the Internet, ever since this whole wireless thing happened, we have become really possessive over our wirelessness. If you pay for wireless Internet in your home, there is NO WAY you are going to allow someone else to “steal” it from you. STEAL. Now we are using that word? “You can’t steal the Internet from me because I am going to password protect it!” This phrase goes through our heads when we talk to Lynksys tech support while we set up our wireless routers for a $20 dollar tech support fee (can you believe that they charge you to set up your device even after you have spent 50 bucks on the stupid thing. We know we can’t get much for free, but I don’t think tech support is too much to ask). Ok, so here we are on the phone with Lynksys. They say, “ok ma’am, would you like to set-up your wireless router password protected?” Hell yeah I do, you say in your head, but in an effort not to seem greedy, you say, “Well, sure, I think that would be a good idea.” Uh huh. Those bitches that just moved in down the hall making all that noise aren’t going to steal MY Internet.
Maybe I’m a little bitter. The truth is that a month ago, there were two young girls who moved into the all-adult-and-families building I live in, and after a few days, asked my roommate if they could have to password to our internet until they get theirs hooked up. OK, fine. She gave it to them, So two weeks goes by and my roommates computer gets all screwed up. Was it because we made our Internet available to the newbie’s on our floor? We’ll never know, but what we DO know is that they blast their music really loud every single night and slam their doors until 4 in the morning and we are paying for the Internet and they are not. My roommate and I decided, their privileges must be revoked. No more Internet for you! I called Lynksys (and after arguing with them about helping me without the 20 dollar fee, I was able to convince them to help) and I changed the name of our connection and the password. 2 days later, one of the girls showed up begging to get the password so she could make a deadline for a paper. Sorry bout ya, don’t care if you hate me. But I did manage to suggest a place down the street with free wireless Internet. A nice local coffee shop.

Our bodies, which understand how to do something when even the mind is not at work is a concept I had not really thought about before. I mean, our bodies automatically react to stimuli, when it’s cold we shiver; when it’s hot we sweat. These are automatic responses built into our systems. If they didn’t work, then we would die.

Habit is an interesting concept. I think that habit can help us and destroy us. We see destruction in smoking, drinking, other habit-forming substances. We can fall victim to habit even if it is not necessarily harmful to our bodies. This happened to me yesterday when I got off of the 5 train heading downtown at 42nd street to transfer to the 6 so I could get off at a local stop…but the local stop I wanted to go to was past Union Square. Every day I transfer to the 6 at Grand Central so I can get off at 23rd Street. My habit cost me 10 minutes. Of course I was upset, but I could talk my mind out of it realizing that there is nothing that I could do at that point. I just had to ride the stupid 6 train.

Connerton talks about the habits of the body. My train experience dealt with the mind, the mind remembering where to go and what to do. I suppose my body was involved, but this is something different than remembering keys on a keyboard. In both instances, however, one can make a mistake. In both instances, it can cost some time (as when we have to go back and fix what we messed up).

There are some things I want to address here, flaws in the mechanical engineering that we do with our bodies, and these “habits” and the mechanics of the keyboard–a machine that we use to write for us once our fingers (extensions of our bodies) figure out how to use it. When we engineer our bodies to do something like type on a keyboard, something that becomes a habit (and most of the times in a good way so that it can beneficial in our computer-mediated society and computer-based jobs), our bodies automatically expect that anything resembling that machine will be just like the one that we have used before. When I went to Italy, however, the keyboard that I started to use, while set up similarly, had different placement for important characters such as the “2” and even the apostrophe. It took me at least 5 minutes to figure out where these keys were, how to make them work, and then another 2 days or so to stop making the same mistake of putting some weird character I had never seen before instead of the “@”. All the emails I wrote to friends and family did not have apostrophes, so I apologized for my poor grammar. And I couldn’t figure out how to make colons, so I couldn’t make smilies (as most of us in the younger generation know, smilies are an important source of emotion). So my point is that when we program our bodies to do something, be it in the mind or in the actual body (such as the fingers) there is always room for error. Any sort of programming will always have some sort of error.

Every culture has habits that make up the individual. These habits can be changed over time. It seems like we as humans are born to take on habits, if we didn’t have them, we wouldn’t be able to handle our everyday lives. For example, without programming that we have to brush our teeth everyday, or feed a baby at a certain time…we wouldn’t be able to take care of ourselves. These actually are obligations that turn into habits because without someone teaching us, we wouldn’t know that we are supposed to do them in the first place. Furthermore, we can choose not to do them. The more that we don’t do them, the less we care about doing them correctly. We want to program ourselves to do the righ things in the right way, but someone has to teach us.

This brings me to humans and computers. Don’t we have to teach the computers how to make words happen on a word document? And then we teach humans how to type so that the computer can do it? In the end someone is teaching a computer, and someone is teaching the mechanics to a human. It all might be habits and mechanical, but it’s still all teachable and learned. You know what

I know that with new technologies and as Hayles noted, machines are taking place of human work, it is easy to get excited about the notion of the posthuman. What Hayles fails to mention in this particular reading, though, is that of the heart, emotion and mind. I find it discerning and a little scary, frankly, that someone is excited about the prospext of being replaces by something mechanic. The one thing that has remained consistent in my mind is a pulse. Living, breathing. When we talk of cybernetics, sure, we can talk about where the mind can take us, but what about our hearts? I’d rather have a big heart than be able to complete every task in the world as quickly and efficiently as possible. Maybe that’s just because that is the kind of person I am now.

When Hayles does mention feeling, it is in reference to desire. I live for desire. Is she saying that if we are one day machines we will lack desire and therefore never feel empty? Touch any machine and tell me whether or not you can feel warmth…not the kind emanating from a hot battery. This actually reminds me of a machine that I heard about where you can hook it up to your computer, and it sexually stimulates you. Like a vibrator that the person on the other side of the computer, the person you are talking to, has control over. One could argue that there is a machine separating what two minds want the other to feel. Somehow this might be gratifying but in the end, it’s only fantasy, and it’s still just a machine. You can’t lay down with the machine and cuddle with it. You’re left still fantasizing. So even if we did advance into being machines or living solely through machines or depending on machines…I think we would lose touch with the reality of our selves and the real human beings around us.

There is no “workable” solution for extreme feelings, for hurt, pain, and those linked to romance and sexuality. Not everything can be fixed with equations, not everything is that simple. Machines can’t tell us everything. There are a lot of people out there who think that there is an answer to everything, that there is always a solution. But sometimes you have to just deal with what is going on. This reminds me of how trapped I feel when I am in Second Life. Even when I have feelings of discomfort or unease, I feel trapped because I can’t express that to the person who is there. The can’t see the real look on my face…this is also the case with any sort of machine that mediates conversation, such as a telephone, a cell phone, text messaging…Text messaging in particular because we try to use smilie faces and punctuations to get feelings across That wink, right there one who I reading this may have had a change of heart about my reading from, “Wow, this girl is taking this way too seriously” to “oh, she is just messing around. If however, I ended it with ! my audience would think that I was pissed. So, instead, I’ll keep it frank and honest without too much feeling and end it with a .

Back to the posthuman…Hayles says that the posthuman is not the end of humanity, it doesn’t have to be the antihuman, but I guess that is the way that I take it.  And why should anyone be excited about that? I am all for continuing with developing technologies, and progressing forward, even to make life a bit easier, but to suggest that machines will completely take over is a bit extreme. I also acknowledge that thinking can be shared by both human and computer…but feelings and answers to what happens in our hearts cannot.

I registered late for the class, couldn’t set up a blog, and wasn’t really clear on what our assignments and expectations were for our first assignment…so I took some notes on what we discussed about the cell phone reading and thought after the ingestion of the many reponses to the article, I would spit back some of my thoughts.

I don’t really have a problem with the way the research was conducted, nor do I have an issue with the fact that this study may not “help” the people there. I think that researching for the sake of researching is invaluable enough to the person doing it. In the medical field, there is always a purpose, the hope that some cure will be found or we can graduate to a new way of approaching how to find a cure or producing better vaccines or instruments. My background is in communication studies, so while I didn’t find the way this article was written particularly stimulating, I did think that the content itself was interesting, and I admire that someone conducted this research.

I also appreciated the vernacular. I thought it was a smart way of organizing the information. If the purpose of ethnography is to live the experience of the people or culture you are researching, then that should be applies to the study. As much as solid factual information helps a more “scientific” way of researching to be more credible, using what has been learned in the social sciences should be backed up with evidence of cultural influence over the researcher. I think it helps disguise the fact that personal opinion can get in the way of research.

Apart from the actual research approach, the most fascinating part of this article I think was the personification of begging. To say that sharing credits and asking for money for cell phone credits is like “begging”, something that is accepted, was an alarming suggestion at first. I find the word to be extremely judgmental and crude, something that I felt was demeaning to the culture. I wondered if someone from the culture read this, would they think that the word begging was appropriate?

I had to remind myself of what a cell phone represents–family, wealth and popularity to name a few. I thought about the “digital divide” and how it only pertains to certain media. It’s easy to get a hand on a cell phone, hard to reach a computer. The need for communication has become so strong and immediate, that we have devised these cell phones to make it happen, here and now. I agree with the claim that we are creating technology that is basically demanded by society, not that society’s technology is taking over. Putting into perspective the difference of how we all live across societies and integrate technologies, specially cell phones, is difficult, but I respect this research and it helped me come out of my egocentric tendency for a moment. I think that;s the most important thing for cross-cultural ethnographic research.