Desire and technology in the workplace

1. Desire and technology in the workplace Exploration, reification & transgression IML 501 | Laurel Felt | September 30, 2010 |

2. Computer as Metaphor

3. Culture Clash

4. Culture Clash

5. Language • "the language they used strongly influenced the kinds of things they could produce" (Stone, p. 103) ... • "Rather, it was an element within a system, a building block in an associated group of elements that, taken together, represented a complete philosophy of life" (Stone, p. 105). • Discourse surfer

6. Control • "Would quiet anarchy have prevailed for a longer time, or, given the possibility of a more gradual evolution toward more structured social order, would it perhaps have prevailed forever? Perhaps the future of electronic virtual communities would have been quite different" (Stone, p. 118).

7. Cybersex, sexuality & gender • "Would that we could all log out out of our oppressions or our unpleasant social situations" (Stone, p. 120)

8. Research • “innovation, taking risks, doing new things" • vs. • “duplication, slight changes on an already accepted idea, but finding out how to duplicate their successes better and cheaper" (Stone, p. 133)

9. Games • Where’s the fun? • Bring in the drama

10. Interactivity • Lippmann's 5 tenets: • mutual interruptibility, graceful degradation, limited look-ahead, no-default, the impression of an infinite database (Stone, pp. 10-11) • Is perspective implied in this concept? • contrast this with Van Doren's viewpoint "Encyclopedias don't present viewpoints. Encyclopedias present truth" (cited in Stone, p. 136).

11. Presence • "Central to the construction of agents was the idea of presence. What, exactly, was it about a representation that gave it the illusion of personal force, of a living being? And conversely, what did it take to convince a person by means of a representation of a place that they were actually present in that place?" (Stone, p. 139)”…he's real, but he's not live" (Laurel, cited in Stone, p. 145)"...question the structure of meaning production by which we recognize each other as human" (Stone, p. 173).

12. Multiplicity • Haraway'sCoyote's Sisters: • Refuse closure; insist upon situation; and seek multiplicity (cited in Stone, p. 30) • "... the technosocial, the social mode of the computer nets, evokes unruly multiplicity as an integral part of social identity" (Stone, p. 42) • multiplicity as resistance • SARAH JONES, (self-invention, 01:20)

13. Creatures • "Cyborgs are boundary creatures, not only human/machine but creatures of cultural interstice as well" (Stone, p. 178) • Immortality • “Lestat grapples continually with his vampire nature, trying to thrash out workable ethics in all the different worlds he inhabits, each of which he inhabits only partially” (Stone, p. 179) • Unconscious assumption of Other, reclaiming the body

14. "We are as gods and might as well get good at it" • (first line of CommuniTree's first conference prospectus, cited in Stone, p. 110).

15. Stakes • "How is it that the very young, the very talented, don't perceive the incredible power for change that has fallen to them by default -- and the hideous consequence of failing to grasp that weapon when it's offered?" (Stone, p. 164)"How very like the ancient symbol-cluster of the Quest that underlies so many of our culture's heavily gendered, xenophobic stories of transcendence, conquest, and victory" (Stone, p. 164).

16. Stakes • "We are no longer unproblematically secure within the nest of our location technologies, whose function for us (as opposed to for our political apparatus) is to constantly reassure us that we are without question ourselves, singular, bounded, conscious, rational; the end product of hundreds of years of societal evolution in complex dialogue with technology as Other and with gender as an othering machine" (Stone, p. 182).