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?