Participation Literacy

I am going to start this session with two pictures, or stories, meant to illustrate the title: the Technologically Navigating Cyborg. After that the focus is on two questions: what is a cyborg and what is social navigation. Finally, I wrap this up with a concept called ‘flow’ which I think is a good start when trying to explain the link between cyborgity and (social) navigation.

Image 1: Surfing the woods on a Mountain bike.

Image one contains me and one of our civilization’s most frequent means of transport, a bicycle. But it is not a plain old bicycle. It is one of our economic society’s many refigurations, a mountain bike. A mountain bike is an artefact of advanced technology. It has at least 21 gears, is light weight, and is constructed to endure the most exacting conditions. The front fork, for example, has shock absorbers to pick up the force created when you ride in holes and hit stones or stumps. Without the shock absorbers you could easily turn a somersault and break your neck. To prevent head injuries I wear a helmet. In this picture you can see me as a sandwich between the helmet and the bike. In some sense the three layers of the sandwich melt together and create something new, a creature that is confusingly like me on a mountain bike with a helmet on my head. But somehow it is not. It is only a wider knowledge or notion of what I usually call ‘me’ - a refiguration. As we will see later I think you can call this refiguration some kind of cyborg.

In this extended picture of myself, my skin has a black shiny surface resembling a track suit made of hi-tech, waterproof and breathing materials. My eyes are big and brown like a pair of hyper-modern shades and my crouching back has a hump resembling a small knapsack. I look like a cross between a human and a lizard modified by additional artefacts, tailored to challenge every possible obstacle on the trails that wind through the woods surrounding my hometown Ronneby.

Now scenery is added to the picture – and motion. I am crashing through the woods on small trails packed with obstacles like stones, arm-thick roots and treacherous small stumps. I have to focus entirely on the task of navigating, forget the details of my existence. I become one with the bike and I manoeuvre the bike as if it was a part of my self. Nature, technology and navigation melt together in the flow of performing a task that is exiting, fun and challenging.

I am navigating trails that other people have made, and the focusing ‘flow’ I am in makes the I, ME, melt together with the ‘tools’ I am using in the navigation through the woods. With the billons of traces made by people through the decades I am also performing a, rather transparent, task called “Social Navigation”.

Image 2: Surfing the waves of the Internet.

Image two is situated in the field of ICT, Information and Communication Technology. I have a new computer which I am of course strongly aware of, since I built it myself. One day when I am visiting the local newspaper on the Internet I am really enjoying my new computer. The concept of the computer is very alive to me. I can feel it working through my hands. But then I came a cross a fascinating article about a huge whale that exploded when it was transported through a city in Taiwan . A decomposition process in the whale had produced gases which led to the whale exploding and intestines literally rained over the streets. When I finished the article I began to search on “exploding whales” and one thing led to another. Soon I was completely lost in the surfing experience. My awareness of my new computer faded into the navigation process, of which the only goal was to acquire knowledge about exploding whales. Practically every piece of information I got on the way was given to me by other people, intentionally or unintentionally. The whole information seeking process is in fact an act that can be described as social navigation of information resources. In this task of browsing the Internet, the sensation of my new computer fades into the focusing flow, and the computer becomes a part of me in the task of navigation.

The cyborgization process

In “A Cyborg Manifesto”, Donna Haraway created a base for the feminist discussion about the cyborg identity.

The most cited part of Haraway’s essay, I think, is the line where she writes:

“A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism

” (p149). This hybridity is what is always in focus in discussions about the cyborg, but Haraway’s intentions with the concept are definitely much more complex. But there is not time to go into that complexity. For my discussion here, the hybridity between machine and organism is sufficient.

In many discussions of cyborgs and cyborg identity two questions pop up:

Are cyborgs people and are people cyborgs?

Donna Haraway answers that question with these words:

By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. (p150)

I both agree and disagree. We became something of cyborgs hundreds of thousands years ago when some of our forefathers began to use tools to enhance their lack of strength or precision. But I do not see cyborgity as a state. I rather see it as a process.

The cyborgization process started somewhere close to the birth of the human race and will go on as long as long as Homo sapiens exist. The process could also be called artifactization since the cyborg is, in fact, an artefact. Artefacts are cultivated nature and cyborgity is always the most advanced example of artifactization.

Donna Haraway writes about the cyborg as if it was a state, not a process. But there is a passage in “the Manifesto” that, in a way, sees cyborgity as a process. It is when she says that cyborgs are “our ontology; it gives us our politics” (p150). I think Haraway wants to say that cyborgity is the key to our existence. Only by studying cyborgity we might get an understanding of who we are. And only by studying cyborgity we get relevant knowledge to create our future.

Navigation

Navigation is what makes the difference between animals and plants. Animals can navigate and move in certain directions, plants can only move when “nature pushes them”. Of course there are border cases…

One of the most fundamental parts of human characteristics is to take out goals and navigate towards them. I think that navigation is a very effective metaphor in describing the human/cyborg relation to its escalating techno information surroundings.

The success of our navigation depends on our ability to accept our cyborgian nature.

Flow: the link between existence and navigation.

The concept of ’flow’ was coined by the psychologist Michael Csikszentmihalyi in an essay called “Reflections on enjoyment”, published in the journal “Perspectives in Biology and Medicine” 1985.

Ever since then the concept has come to be used by a wide array of researchers in different research areas. Csikszentmihalyi explains ‘flow’ like this:

IMAGINE THAT YOU ARE SKIING DOWN A SLOPE and your full attention is focused on the movements of your body, the position of the skis, the air whistling past your face, and the snow-shrouded trees running by. There is no room in your awareness for conflicts or contradictions; you know that a distracting thought or emotion might get you buried face down in the snow. The run is so perfect that you want it to last forever.

If skiing does not mean much to you, this complete immersion in an experience could occur while you are singing in a choir, dancing, playing bridge, or reading a good book. If you love your job, it could happen during a complicated surgical operation or a close business deal. It may occur in a social interaction, when talking with a good friend, or while playing with a baby. Moments such as these provide flashes of intense living against the dull background of everyday life.

These exceptional moments are what I have called “flow” experiences. The metaphor of flow is one that many people have used to describe the sense of effortless action they feel in moments that stand out as the best in their lives. Athletes refer to it as “being in the zone,” religious mystics as being in “ecstasy,” artists and musicians as “aesthetic rapture.”
(Csikszentmihalyi, 1997)

For me, Flow is when existence melts together with navigation. In a flow experience you forget about who you are and where “YOU” - as a being - start and end. You become a cyborg in the sense that artefacts that are with you in the experience lose their alien-ship. The mountain bike, the skis or the computer become a part of you as much as your legs or arms. You can also say that technology has to become transparent for the flow experience to occur. As soon as a tool or some other kind of artefact becomes opaque the flow experience fails. You return to the view of yourself as an entity that ends with your legs and arms. If you are asked, you say that the mountain bike, the skis or the computer is just another tool you use to perform a task.

Csikszentmihalyi writes that the feeling of flow comes easier if the activity has clear goals (Csikszentmihalyi, 2003, p41). For me, every activity with a goal is navigational in the sense that it is constituted by positioning and taking bearing in order to navigate towards that goal.

In flow experiences that include social navigation, people around you are most important for your navigation. But their function as a tool also fades in flow. The people around you who give the advice or tips also become transparent

I think cyborgity is about transparency. It is when our great dichotomies becomes transparent, like nature-culture, I-you, subject-object, man-woman, human-animal etc. These dichotomies will never be completely transparent, I think, and therefore cyborgity is a process, not a state. Flow is a state though, and when we are in a state of flow, it gives us a peek into the future of how it can be when our present technology becomes more or less transparent.

Tags: cyborg, flow, navigation