Recap

After our class on Thursday, I found it strange to assign cyberspace a gender like in the article "Virtually Female" that we read. I couldn't understand how cyberspace was more male chauvistic or dominated by more males. I remember that Chris brought up in class that on the web, you can make whatever kind of identity that you want. You can go to chat rooms and can be somewhat genderless. Anonymity exists and is often socially accepted.

From Katherine Hayles' article "The Seductions of Cyberspace, I found it interesting how like Mark found the quote that, "Already about 10 percent of the U.S. populations are cyborgs in the technical sense..." I agree that technology has allowed people to become somewhat of a cyborg already for health reasons. My father just had knee replacement surgery last November and it's amazing that they took out his old knee and replaced it with a titanium knee. This also makes me think of my family friend who has special pins in her ankles because of a skydiving accident.

From McLuhan's "Visual and Acoustic Space" article, I felt like this was somewhat related to the Seductions of Cyberspace quote that I mentioned. McLuhan sees technologies as an extension of the human nervous system. With the whole concepts of prosthetics I thought that this really applied to how people are slightly cyborg in their physical sense already. For pacemakers, prosthetic limbs, hearing aids, drug implants, etc... are already technological extensions of ourselves.