Blog Post # 8 Due Saturday 4/14 @ 11:59PM; comment 4/15 @ 11:59PM: So... are we our phones?

Embodied Technology 

When you're talking about feet shaped by shoes, or 'belly fat' deposited by high-fructose corn syrup (and lots else), or even shirts–coming in 'boy' and 'girl' buttoning patterns that reflect and reinforce rigid gender distinctions—it all seems pretty clear. It's subtler when we fold in Ian Hacking (via Carl Elliot) arguing for the 'semantic contagion' of the internet giving us things to think that never occurred to us ('rule 34')—including ideas like that we 'always knew we were men in women's bodies,' or double amputees. Our minds and souls are sort of colonized by technologies. Technology made flesh. Not just 'digital,' but all our 'non-human actors.'

To review: (thought problem) Who would I be in a world without mirrors?  Really: if you had no external image of yourself, how would you represent yourself to yourself?  Or to put it in our theoretical terms: absent technologies of representation and reflection (literally, in the case of mirrors) what would our self-concepts be?  Am I a series of images of myself?  And how do I like them?


The Meitu selfie technology problem begins with a mirror and ends on the operating table during plastic surgery. Focusing on things like skin color and epicanthal eye folds, it engages profound racism and colonial systems. In Brazil, the most common plastic surgery is breast reduction (because big breasts read 'black,' and white is favored). In Viet Nam, it's alteration of eyes to look 'Western' (Sander Gilman. Making the body beautiful). 

And add to this: anime—and the eyes get impossibly huge.

So lots of technologies; some digital, some not, some sort of 'literary'—like anime, which started as comic books.  If I (Robin) had to look like my Meitu selfie, I would hate myself.

So, 'modest proposal': technology gets inside us. Better: we are, and have always been, our technologies. Anthropologist Gregory Bateson (Steps toward an ecology of mind) asks us to think about the 'blind man's (sic) cane.' Where does the man stop and the cane begin?  Is the cane part of the man?  Are we our phones?  And so what?

1. Find a piece of technology that you think has changed you, shaped you—body and soul.  Since we're exploring 'digital,' digital would be good. But really anything you can describe as technology. Robin says he sees his life, now, through how he will present it on Facebook, living in a sort of Facebook-narrative. That's GOT to change his face-to-face interactions. Hmmnmn. Scary. Clearly 'puters and word-processing technology changed how we write. Did IM and texting change how we think? WIKI and 'copy-and-paste' sure changed how we do 'the paper I have to write.' Has PowerPoint (and all those bullets) changed how we teach and learn?  Do we sort of go through life looking for lulz? Has the glorious anarchist freedom from decorum of some subreddits or 4chan /b/ made some of us cynics? Racists? Bros?

2. Analyze and explain how it's worked to shape you.  This is personal, and stories are welcome. But finally, this is what we called part 2 of Science Studies: theorizing how techno-science works—in this case on us, intimately.

Some guiding ideas: 

1. Ideas are technologies. In fact, the whole technology / concept distinction needs to go. Absent a 'framing concept,' any technology would be incomprehensible. Think (Star Trek) about how the aliens would greet an IPhone. And technologies emerge and evolve in response to, and in sync with, evolving culture in general. Again: we are our technologies, and we need to examine the framing concepts.

2.  Embodied technology is a complex 'secret code' for us to crack.

French philosopher Pierre Bourdieu (whom I use extensively in 'Beyond the realm of reason') calls this 'culture-made-flesh' our bodily habitus: all our deeply embedded ways of moving, thinking and being. Beneath consciousness. Automatic. 'Durable dispositions.' Inaccessible to direct, conscious control. Here's Bourdieu (with apologies for the fact that he's not that clear a writer):

All groups entrust the body, treated like a kind of memory, with their most precious possessions, and the use made of the suffering inflicted on the body by rites of initiation . . . is understandable if one realizes . . . that people's adherence to an institution is directly proportional to the severity and painfulness of the rites of initiation. . . .

More convincingly than the external signs which adorn the body (like decorations, uniforms, army stripes, insignia, etc.), the incorporated signs (such as manners, ways of speaking—accents—, ways of walking or standing — gait, posture, bearing —, table manners, etc. and taste) which underlie the production of all practices aimed, intentionally or not, at signifying and at signifying social position through the interplay of distinctive differences, ... function as so many calls to order, by virtue of which those who might have forgotten . . . are reminded of the position assigned to them by the institution.

(Pierre Bourdieu. Language and symbolic power, 1991. 123-4)

The factors which are most influential in the formation of the habitus are transmitted without passing through language and consciousness, but through suggestions inscribed in the most apparently insignificant aspects of the things, situations and practices of everyday life. Thus the modalities of practices, the ways of looking, sitting, standing, keeping silent, or even of speaking (‘reproachful looks’ or ‘tones’, ‘disapproving glances’ and so on) are full of injunctions that are powerful and hard to resist precisely because they are silent and insidious, insistent and insinuating...secret code. (51)