The Art and Science of Everything

Formerly thoughts on gender and technology, I'm expanding this as a place to just generally geek out on gender, technology, design, cognition, perception, and culture. The title should not be considered hubris, but instead enthusiasm.

Tuesday, May 18, 2004

Turkle, "Life on Screen"
MUDing as a space to explore alternate gender identities, "form of consciounsess raising" (214)
"MUDs and the virtual personae one adopts within them are objects-to-think-with for reflecting on the social construction of gender" (213). obj-to-think-with becomes sort of like a cyborg composition, and yet, in the current culture of virtual reality, there is always an out and almost always a clear recognition of which part of the cyborg composition is "reality." (Fundamentally disabling anonymity on the internet would probably threaten this.) But I don't want to trivialize this cyborg experience. Case, the married 34-year old Turkle interviews, describes experiencing emotional pain in relation to some of his MUDing experiences -- "the kind of learning that comes from hard times" (213). Describes the repression of the willful

But this experimentation is only possible because virtual space is virtual, not "real." As one 13-year old who sexually experiments in internet chat rooms made clear to Sherry Turkle, "she feels safe because she can always just 'disconnect'" (227). ( Turkle describes a married 41-year old who was thrilled at the opportunity for sexual experimentation offered by MUDs. "I really am monogamous," he explained. "I'm really not interested in something outside my marriage. But being able to have, you know, a Tiny romance is kind of cool." Another MUDders wife was hurt by her husband's participation in MUD romance, though she explicitly placed MUDs outside the realm of "real life." The irreality of virtual worlds is nothing more than a cultural agreement, subject to slippage over time. Certainly the tension between real life hurt feelings and the trivialization of virtual experiences as unreal point to a crumbling wall at best. But if embodiment is fundamental to sex and sex one element in the actor-network that constructs gender, the meat of the body will never truly become vapor lest we , though such disappearance of the body is a prominent trope in cyberpunk fantasies, rooted in Norbert Wiener's "Human Use of Human Beings." (Synners) [But we don't really have a way of dealing with animal/machine/man hybrids. My imagination cannot conceive of a robot interacting with a human. But what if a robot has a human heart implanted in it? Then I think, if that heart can actually function, it is a human. And that is a genderless being. With stem cell cloning, the continual production of such genderless beings is imaginable. But this is not a victory for feminism. This is simply rendering the issue moot.]

Experience matters - "To pass as a woman for any length of time requires understanding how gender inflects speech, manner, the interpretation of experience" (212).


[Case] picks up [the expression 'aspects of self' eagerly, for MUDding reminds him of how Hindu gods could have different aspects or subpersonalities, all the while having a whole self." -> cyborg a la Chela Sandoval

"There is a chance to discover...gender is constructed" (223). <-- this is what I push against.

Possibilities of Feminist HCI:

object-to-think-with almost seems heidegerrian to me, for some reason. But I think it's just a verbal similarity as Heidegger's bent is that we can operate in the world without having a theory of the world. that objects we operate are ready-to-hand and our theories and knowledge about them only come through breakdown. Well, Turkle's tools are a way of stepping outside the reference frame and evoking dissonance and breakdown so we can get beyond our embodied experience. So maybe this is a genuine feminist possibility in HCI. Only by having a theory of alternatives can you actually consider yourself off exercising choice. (There go the feminists, ruining people's lives by confusing issues and overwhelming us with choices again.)

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