One of my favorite family stories happened last Easter, when my Mom was taking pictures of me and all my cousins outside. My youngest cousin, about two and walking but barely speaking at the time, kept breaking away from the group between shots and hanging on my mom's arms. No one could figure out what she wanted until my mom put the camera down for a minute and my little cousin immediately started looking at the pictures. My mom couldn't stop marveling about the idea that someone so young already understood this technology, having only mastered digital photography very recently herself.

 Clark describes “scaffolding” as the support system offered by technology to people. Interestingly, when Clark speaks to a colleague about his research, he learns about cognitive scaffolding. Here, technology acts as a memory support which debilitates our memories. For instance, a cell phone now has the ability to keep one’s schedule and to even remind them before the event occurs. This “scaffold” has enabled people to keep their appointments and be on time however, if their technology fails, their world comes crashing down. Clark tells us to forget the fear of a world where technology takes over by using the phrase post human.

  I found Clark’s article fascinating and eye-opening. I have always felt a bit apprehensive about the future of technology and what its advancement might mean for the future of us as people and a society. I was deeply troubled by an article I read a few years ago that posited a future in which human-technology synthesis would result in immortal ‘people’. Although quite a large—if not unbelievable—claim I still felt unnerved by the article’s painstaking and convincing analysis of this future. A future with such uncharacteristically ‘human’ advancements is unsurprisingly disconcerting.

Going back to Monday's conversation... The question was asked, can we really become one with everything? Someone in class said that skin is a physical boundary between and organism and its environment. I disagree with this. Our bodies are constantly interacting with the environment -- sharing electrons, exchanging gases and nutrients, hosting viruses and bacteria, etc. So I don't really see extending ourselves into technology as something completely foreign.

On Day 3, "Natural Born Cyborgs,"
We first watched the Selarc video, which mentioned the idea of the body as a sculptural medium and an evolutionary architecture. Many people in the class seemed disturbed and/or intrigued by the art. Thinning the boundary between self and other makes us feel existentially uncomfortable.

We reflected on our initial postings and the Clark reading:

When talking about “Organs of extreme perfection and complication,” Darwin states that “His reason ought to conquer his imagination; though I have felt the difficulty far too keenly to be surprised at any degree of hesitation in extending the principle of natural selection to startling lengths” (212). He seems to say that, if we let ourselves trust reason and let it carry our thoughts, reason can take us places where even our imaginations don’t have the power to take us. I think this is particularly interesting because literature sometimes seems to imply the opposite; that imagination can take us where reason cannot. Doesn’t science then become a sort of literature if it is asking us to trust in something that we can never know, and to imagine what then might be possible?

As I stated in class, I really disagree with Clarks claims that humans are "Natural Born Cyborgs."  I understand what both Clark and Harraway are doing in their articles; they are using culturally loaded terms, in this case "technology" and "cyborgs", and challenges the reader to redefine them.  For instance, at one point Clark argues that simply using a pen to write is technological advancement and that because we are so able to adapt and use tools as extensions of ourselves we are "natural born cyborgs" ("cyborg" here challenges the reader to think of a cyborg as not one who is physically grafted with metal or one who becomes part machine but rather one who uses tools).

 It’s odd how our relationship with technology and becoming cyborgs with technology based/affected ‘scaffolding’ is something Clark describes as being exclusive to the human mind, or something that defines us. Being ‘primed to seek’ helpful technology seems a lot like a survival instinct, but strangely Clark speaks against evolutionary psychology. A lot of the intuitive integration of technology even simple ones such the multiplication tables he talks about on page 6, are things that we get familiar with not because we naturally absorb them, but because we feel they will benefit us (or there’s punishment for not memorizing them.)

What is a 'cyborg'? According to the dictionary on my MacBook, a 'cyborg' is a:

'Fictional or hypothetical person whose physical abilities are extended beyond human limitations by mechanical elements built into the body."

This definition itself is not clear. The phrases "human limitations" and "mechanical elements" strike me as being unclear as they can be interpreted in a multitude of different ways. What are "human limitations" and what makes an element "mechanical". Given the lack of clarity, its virtually impossible to ascribe anything to the category of a "cyborg". And this is true of other terms. For example, the category of 'female'. My dictionary says that the definition of 'female' is: