It’s interesting, I’ve just taken a look at Clare’s most recent post and the account of her visit to the temple in Thailand which is a parallel theme to the one which I have explored in my previous post. Although it feels odd that I have focused to some extent on what are apparently ‘non’ digital themes in terms of extreme body alteration, the questions raised of course do reflect critically upon a naïve idea that there exists or existed a non enhanced human, or a person whom exists ‘without tools’, or without the ‘inscriptions’ which Grosz (1995) speaks of. The idea of a human as intrinsically ‘a reflection of those things he (sic) interacts with’ (cited in Miller 2011, p218; Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton, 1981:1) seems stark in its implications for our relationship with digital. This is good preparation for a consideration of Bayne ‘What’s the matter with technology enhanced learning’ (2014), to come in a subsequent post this week.

It is also interesting to be back with Ihde (Miller, 2011, cited page 219; Ihde, 1990), and to reflect on the point that it is difficult to conceive of the idea of a human who is not now, or who has already  not been tied in with technology, or of such a person existing in the past. Interestingly. Boellstorff in ‘Personhood’ (1996) refers to Ihde (cited 1996, p135; 2002) in making the point that we are not just embodied in a physical sense but in a cultural and social sense,  too. This is not obviously (!) the only example  of a continuation of a theme from IDEL.

Below are two Youtube, clips (from my lifestream) which stand out in terms of the comments made here. Others are intended to be bundled with commentary on the film festival features, to be posted this week.

The first may not sit easily (I don’t know!), but I like the face painting at the beginning  (against the background of the previous post) and the play on  appearance and gender, of latent consumerism, ‘retro digital’ an overall construction, and in a way a dystopian landscape invoking  ‘an intentionality of  fantasy and actuality’.  The notion of engineered ‘digital actual landscapes’, requires more attention here. Perhaps we should watch  five minutes of PKD’s ‘A Day In The Afterlife’, (below) very quickly after this viewing.

One important point for me was considering landscapes, as a theme during IDEL,  (maps in particular were a focus for a representation of learning as a general point).  This clip from Youtube has been around for a while, but gives a sense of our ‘hermeneutic relationship’ (cited 2011, p220; Ihde, 2002) with technology, as places ‘which might not be the object of experience but its means’. ‘Robinson in Space’ may seem odd as a choice of clip, but it’s the beginning of a train of thought, and so it’s included here (my recent experience of vast low density (not always low!)) urban environments is an interesting comparison . Again as already hinted, the first five  minutes of Philip K. Dick (A Day In the Afterlife) gives us a different notion of what is being hinted at here, as an equal comparison.

Finally ‘tools’ are featured in the article here in this life stream tweet:

#mscedc Memory and nearly human Via @nprnews: Maybe Early Humans Weren't The First To Get A Good Grip http://t.co/DIzXdEW3Ar

— Miles Prowse (@mychioiles) January 24, 2015

From NPR, these tools were apparently created in the far distant past by genetically close relatives of ‘humans’.  Does this merely make them ‘nearly’ human, as so much digital technology might be conceived as being capable of?  I have more thoughts on this obviously, but I’ve exceeded my word count, again.