To engage or not to engage: tool choice and identity

I stumbled across the Technium, a blog by Kevin Kelly that explores technology’s impact on culture, or perhaps I should say technology’s encompassing of culture.  Kelly describes “Technium” as …

It’s a word I’ve reluctantly coined to designate the greater sphere of technology – one that goes beyond hardware to include culture, law, social institutions, and intellectual creations of all types. In short, the Technium is anything that springs from the human mind. It includes hard technology, but much else of human creation as well. I see this extended face of technology as a whole system with its own dynamics.

At first glance, his ideas seem similar to McLuhan‘s view of the media as deterministic.  Yet, his stance seems to take on a more ecological angle, arguing that technology is an organism, in itself … see interview excerpt below.

What I am most drawn to in this interview is his discussion of identity as a matter of refusing technologies. In other words, our choice to take up or engage with a certain hardware or software has just as much impact on one’s identity, if not more, than what we do choose to use. These ideas are further explored in the essay Identity from What-Is-Not.

This makes me think about my choices not to use Twitter, or Delicious.  While I find these software programs and the social practices they motivate to be very interesting in terms of collaborative construction and distribution of knowledge, I haven’t yet felt a strong enough need to personally engage.  This focus on the “process of refusal” is a fascinating and powerful line of inquiry for me to explore in terms of my interests in identity and student engagement with digital media.

Thank you Kevin Kelly.  I can’t wait for your book to come out.

creatural existence

creatural existence for human beings is about maximizing meaning, but through the operation of sensuous embodiment including, these days, through the technological extension of the senses. (Embodiment and Education pg 75)

So the sensitive body, deeply in communion with its environment, is not a body over which mind has control.  In other words, it is not that body which educational theorising has assumed — a separate entity in a wold of material objects–but rather is of the very same stuff of its environs, living and non-living bodies.  As such it is never fixed but rather emerges again and again out of a constantly changing web of relations to an environment of things, people, projects, demands and the earth with its species and features (pg 75)

In Marjorie O’Loughlin’s philosophical exploration of the body and learning, she presents an ecological model of subjectivity, which she describes as “creatural living” (Embodiment and Education)

Creatural living challenges dualist notions of mind and body by presenting the body as the locus of knowing and action, the site where meaning making occurs via multisensorial embodiment with ones environment. Yet, O’Loughlin extends this multisensorial experience beyond that of the traditional senses of vision, aural, touch, taste, etc. to the sensations made possible through activities and practice within systemic collaborations between bodies and technologies (pg 66-67).  As O’Loughlin clarifies:

So it might be said not that we are what we do, but rather that the doing itself is governed by what we have, so to speak, in our hands at the moment of action.  Technologies therefore cannot be characterised either as mere tools for human use on the one hand or as uncontrollable forces which ultimately take control over all aspects of human life, removing from it any real sence of agency. Rather to the extent that actors are altered by what they use (what they do with what they have at hand, so to speak), they extend the boundaries of their individual bodies beyond the skin. (pg 67)

In this sense, the practices we take up in partnership with technological hardware and software not only extend the boundaries of the body beyond the skin, but also envelop activity as a practice of embodiment.

O’Loughlin goes on to describe these practices as “tied inextricably to a vast repertoire of bodily dispositions, which also bear the imprint or shape of the resident technologies inhabiting various sites which are the particular places in which those bodies are niched” (p.70)  This repertoire then becomes the basis from which “individuals make themselves corporeally,” a set of practices that not only “expresses who they are” but also ” “affords them a wealth of opportunity for creative endeavors” (p. 70).  In other words, these practices are potent in their ability to reproduce or create anew opportunities to speak and make meaning. Repeated, ritualized, and patterned, these practices form repertoires, which become the crux of making meaning, the site of body building.

It is important to keep in mind, that the body does not harness and command the technologies as tools for its own individual doing, rather the technologies are senses that expand the body’s capability for knowing.

As O’Loughlin describes

It is the body (not simply a guiding consciousness) that understands its world, and it is the body which holds within it those intentional threads that run outward to the world: the body’s grasping of the world is like a set of invisible but intelligent threads streaming out between body and the specific world wth which  each body is familiar.” (p. 81)

In other words, it is the body that understands the world, not the consciousness. Via its extended multisensorial network, the body is able to sense, interpret, and create beyond its abilities otherwise.

In this networked sense of the body, agency is thus constructed across networks of relations between animate and non-animate objects and not housed within individuals. (p. 67).   For example …

What then does this mean for education?

Well, according to O’Loughlin, our current educational systems and culture at large have a “fear of idleness” and thus over-regulate children’s lives with activities and tasks.  This in turn, limits children’s embodied knowing by hindering their “instinct to roam” and learn via engagement and entanglement with a variety of objects animate and inanimate (p. 91)

How then might hybrid learning experiences promote more embodied awareness and effective agency?

visual bias and the flattening of the body

“If the world is now presented to us most convincingly through the lens of the camera, by means of television footage, or via images on the Internet, what then might the ramifications be for creatural embodiment? Is the body in its multiple sensory dimensions somehow diminished by this excessive attention to sight, to vision, to the eye?” (p. 22)

While reading Margorie O’Loughlin’s chapter on the “scopic regime” (from Embodiment and Education: Exploring Creatural Existence) I am drawn to her discussion of our culture’s bias towards vision as a superior way of knowing.  She goes on to describe our visual bias as downgrading our attention to the other senses and hence limiting the embodied experience made possible through multisensory ways of knowing.

I had never thought of visual ways of knowing as “oppressive” or “predatory” yet O’Loughlin argues that reliance on the visual  limits our understanding of the body as an organism of knowing. Not only does vision neglect the multisensory, it also separates us from our surroundings through objectifying what we see.  This objectification creates a conceptual distance between the body and the world, which O’Loughlin and others (Nietzsche and Merleau Ponty) argue works against an embodied collaboration between body and world. As O’Loughlin describes:

Our bodies and movement are in ceaseless interaction with the environment; we are not distanced from that world in any meaningful sense.  Rather, world and “subject” infuse, inform, shape and reshape each other constantly. (p. 40)

I can’t help but think about how the visual imperative impacts participation online.  While yes, most of the participation is done via looking at a screen, thus an enhanced separation between self and world (virtual or real), I wonder if online participation offers other routes of “implacement” or multisensory collaboration, such as collaborations between the visual and the aural?  I think specifically of digital storytelling where music and the intricacies of voice offer unique materialities to the practices of expression.

The more I think about these aural/visual experiences, the more I think about Merleau Ponty’s discussion of perception as not merely visual but a multisensorial experience that builds flesh. While I’ve only started to read about Merleau Ponty‘s concepts of depth, perception, flesh, and intentionality of the body, I feel that he will be an important part of my work, specifically the aspects of understanding how it is that we construct meaning online, via connections and creation of texts. These connections and creations thus leave traces, or perhaps tissues, that build bodies online, that sense, respond, and perhaps actively resist. How might this reframing of the body open up new understandings of skin?

photo credits

knowing through dancing: learning the discourse of motion

Upon finishing my second class of Contemporary Indian Dance, taught by Ananya Chatterjea, I can’t help but think about the ways in which the body, or even a single limb, can be mobilized to act be it through surrender or resistance.  It is Ananya’s voice that summons my muscle groups to speak in ways I’m still trying to understand.

photo credit (for more info on Orissi dance tradition: Images & Music)

On my first day of class she beckoned that we “articulate our feet” a phrase that continues to haunt me.  Never before had I thought of my feet as having anything to say, or any allure for attention.  Yet, it was her persistence that we flex our feet and move them in these stylized motions that taught me, through aches and pains that our limbs, even the lowliest of the feet, can be speaking agents that rewrite the rules of participation and interaction.

I can tell already that this dance class will teach me through participation new ways to take up my body as an instrument to write and resist.

(added 10/15/09) Five weeks into the course, I continue to hear Dr. Chatterjea use metaphors of writing to describe the movement of the body.  For example, yesterday when explaining the various eye movements (yes, the eyes do dance and with intention), Ananya described how “the eyes follow the hands to create a narrative.”  I am very drawn to the idea of different body regions moving in coordination with others and those movement co-constructing a narrative.  I find these allusions to the body as technology for writing narratives to be quite generative in my thinking about bodies online as vehicles for participation.

See also Body In Motion Blog