Argument: Computers are changing our sense of human identity.
There are two sides to this; one side being the way that scientists are trying to make humans more like computers, and the other side being how humans are trying to make computers more like themselves. To start, I will want to look at how we are so connected with the internet and our virtual communities and identities. We carry the internet in our pockets or our backpacks and are constantly checking to see the latest tweets and Facebook updates. I will use Adriana de Souza e Silva’s article while discussing this part of the paper.
I want to show how we are humanizing our computers and how this is changing our idea of ‘human’. We want our computers to be our companion or our pet. We tend to form these relationships with our machines for various reasons including to lessen the fear we have of technology. We do this by naming our computers and giving it characteristics. As humans we have a need for intimacy and relationships and for those that do not have a physical relationship which they can depend on, computers fill that void. For this portion of the paper I will draw from Deborah Lupton’s article: The embodied computer/user, as well as Sherry Turkle’s article, How Computers Change the Way We Think.
I will finally want to look at how science is trying to change the identity of what a human is. We see scientists toying with the idea of mutation as well as things such as robots and technology being implanted into humans. Technolgy is used in biology and medicine. We also see humans becoming more technological in the sense that we spend a majority of our time in cyberspace. If we engage in a relationship on the sims and have a ‘biological child’, is that a real person? We see technology constantly being infused into our lives, giving the younger generation a different kind of identity than say an older generation. They are more involved with their technology and it is in turn changing how the rest of the world perceives them. This portion of the paper will draw from Turkle’s book, Life on the Screen and Timothy Lenoir and Casey Alt’s article, Flow Process Fold.
De Souza e Silva, Adriana. From Cyber to Hybrid.: mobile technologies as interfaces of hybrid spaces. The Cybercultures Read, 2nd Ed. David Bell and Barbara Kennedy. New York: Routledge, 2002. Print.
Adriana de Souza e Silva’s article talks a lot about hybrid spaces and how we are constantly connected to the internet. Because we have the internet in our phones, our computers, or what have you we can constantly keep connected.
Lupton, Deborah. The Embodied Computer/User. The Cybercultures Read, 2nd Ed. David Bell and Barbara Kennedy. New York: Routledge, 2002. Print.
Throughout this article, Lupton discusses how we put emotion into our machines, and we often spend more time with our computers than we do with other people.
Turkle, Sherry. How Computers Change the Way we Think. http://www.owlnet.rice.edu/~comp300/documents/HowComputersChangeThinking.pdf
Throughout this article, Turkle talks about what computers are doing for and to us. Computers are changing how we see ourselves, acting as a mirror, reflecting our identity back at us.
Turkle, Sherry. Life on the Screen.
This book, subtitled, Identity in the age of the internet, is simply about that. Turkle discusses how we interact with the internet and how our online relationships are effecting us.
