Manifested Cyborgs?

Cyborgs... a combination of machine and "organism," described as a creature of social reality and a creature of fiction. I guess cyborgs are extremely loosely described if we can talk about humans as being cyborgs if we're cyborgs because we take medicine. We also give animals medicine if they need it, does that make them cyborgs as well? "The cyborg is a matter of fiction and lived experience that changes what counts as women's experience in the late twentieth century. This is a struggle over life and death, but the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion," according to Haraway.

When I envision a cyborg, I see Star Trek like creatures, that are made up of both human and artificial or science fiction like parts. I don't think of taking human made medicine as making humans like cyborgs at all. If humans ever truly evolved into cyborgs, I believe we would be more like computers when conceived or we'd have to scientifically alter genetic make ups or replace human parts with machine parts to become actual cyborgs. Just the thought of humans as cyborgs is apalling to me but maybe its inevitable?

Cyber what?

First of all, I don't really know how I feel about this. It's relatively uncomfortable for me to talk about things that people do in their free time, especially things that I feel are weird and basically disturbing. The rape in this case were the acts occurring in the MUD, which is not even close to a RL rape, which is something that physically actually occurs, not something on a computer screen. The idea that these two things are even compared upsets me. There are clearly differences between real and symbolic action.

As far as there being victims in those whole ordeal, I really could care less. That may sound a little careless of me to say, but if something happening online in some weird setting such as this one, I would rather never hear anything about it or be brought into the ordeal. I guess the punishment was appropriate for the , but I altogether don't care. Mr. Bungle's virtual head can be taken for all it matters to me, this has no bearing on my life and hopefully no one around me is involved in this either. Mr. Bungle is not the name of anyplayer any more, VR is over for that character.

HE SHE

Lewin

This is a very weird occurence and I don't really know exactly how I feel about this subject. On one hand, I believe Lewin truly just wanted to help people, but on the other hand he was quite deceptive, especially in the extent he went to, in order to achieve his target audience. The nature behind the deception is that he found women who needed help and posed as a woman that had gone through extremely traumatic times herself in order to help other women. I tend to feel that he is a good person for attempting to help these women at all costs, though he definitely was deceptive with some of the outrageous things he tried to make up, including the wedding and near death experience in particular.
Differentiating between real life and virtual reality should be extremely simple. There doesn't need to be warnings upon entering cyberspace, because it should be a given that virtual reality is not necessarily anything like real life. Communication over the internet is shaded in gray far more than reality is. Being able to see things, gives a sense of understanding that is totally taken away on the internet. Real life face to face interaction is the only way to know who you are actually talking to. On the web if you enter a random chatroom any one can be pretending to be anyone... which makes the web a place that is taylor made for deception.

Interview blog

First of all virtual reality is something that is relatively scary to me, because I think it is something that can easily get out of hand. Virtual reality to me is a combination of philosophy, math, and perceived realities through programmed languages that are distorted into a new kind of reality, virtual reality. I don't truthfully want to see virtual reality as something that is mainstreamed into peoples' everyday lives other than in ways that aren't detrimental to living the way we currently do. I do not believe VR is better than any media we currently have, though is a revolutionary way of doing things.

What Lanier describes seems to be science fiction to me though I do not doubt could one day become a common thing. I would like to not be around for that becoming a common thing, but it's way beyond my control. If VR became as common as television the entire world as we know it would change because reality would not be reality, virtual reality and its distorted ways would become the reality that people perceived. Most of Lanier's comments were interesting and his thoughts very intelligent, but I particularly like how he talked about the reality people show others and what we perceive as being different. That statement was the one that made most clear sense to me, while most of the other things he talked about were over my head.

filmtext

When I first opened filmtext, I thought it was a bit philosophical. After the random questions floating by started to annoy me, I decided to look around a little bit. I clicked on the little symbols on top and random weird things would happen. The more I looked around, the more useless filmtext appeared to me; there was no point to it as far as I'm concerned, though I'm sure whoever made it hade every intention of it meaning something.

I think filmtext is something new, not a game or a novel, maybe barely a website, though anybody can make a simple website. It has links like other media and is eye-catching to begin with, but after that it is unlike anything I have come across before. If it has a plot I didn't really understand it nor did I have the patience for the ambiguity of it. I didn't have any enjoyment interacting with it, because it was not straight-forward enough for me to prefer to use anything of the sort.