Agenda Item Week 10

From A Cyborg Manifesto:
In the manifesto, Haraway argues that the cyborg - a fusion of animal and machine - trashes the big oppositions between nature and culture, self and world that run through so much of our thought. Why is this important? In conversation, when people describe something as natural, they're saying that it's just how the world is; we can't change it. For example, women for generations were told that they were "naturally" weak, submissive, and overemotional. That it was "in their nature" to be mothers rather than corporate raiders, to prefer parlor games to particle physics. If all these things are natural, they're unchangeable.

On the other hand, if women (and men) aren't natural but are constructed, like a cyborg, then, given the right tools, we can all be reconstructed. Everything is up for grabs, from who does the dishes to who frames the constitution. Basic assumptions suddenly come into question, such as whether it's natural to have a society based on violence and the domination of one group by another. In this way, "the cyborg is a matter of fiction and lived experience that changes what counts as women's experience in the late twentieth century" (Haraway 149).

From The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat:
"The system we developed can support a population of thousands of users in a single shared cyberspace. Habitat presents its users with a real-time animated view into an online simulated world in which users can communicate, play games, go on adventures, fall in love, get married, get divorced, start businesses, found religions, wage wars, protest against them, and experiment with self-government" (Introduction Morningstar and Farmer). Habitat people are not clearly differentiating the levels of technology. They mean to say that human interaction is at the core of the game, but at the same time they imply that there is a level of the technology that shapes what goes on in the social space. The rules shape what occurs between social interaction in the game. This becomes unclear because the reading does not clearly define the two technologies in which ideas are separate but are interconnected.