From the Publisher:
In this age of DNA computers and artificial intelligence, information is becoming disembodied even as the "bodies" that once carried it vanish into virtuality. While some marvel at these changes, envisioning consciousness downloaded into a computer or humans "beamed" Star Trek -style, others view them with horror, seeing monsters brooding in the machines. In How We Became Posthuman, N. Katherine Hayles separates hype from fact, investigating the fate of embodiment in an information age.
Hayles relates three interwoven stories: how information lost its body, that is, how it came to be conceptualized as an entity separate from the material forms that carry it; the cultural and technological construction of the cyborg; and the dismantling of the liberal humanist "subject" in cybernetic discourse, along with the emergence of the "posthuman."
Ranging widely across the history of technology, cultural studies, and literary criticism, Hayles shows what had to be erased, forgotten, and elided to conceive of information as a disembodied entity. Thus she moves from the post-World War II Macy Conferences on cybernetics to the 1952 novel Limbo by cybernetics aficionado Bernard Wolfe; from the concept of self-making to Philip K. Dick's literary explorations of hallucination and reality; and from artificial life to postmodern novels exploring the implications of seeing humans as cybernetic systems.
Although becoming posthuman can be nightmarish, Hayles shows how it can also be liberating. From the birth of cybernetics to artificial life, How We Became Posthuman provides an indispensable account of how we arrived in our virtual age, and of where we might go from here.
Cited By
- Naccarato T and MacCallum J Critical Appropriations of Biosensors in Artistic Practice Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Movement Computing, (1-7)
- Lupton D Self-tracking cultures Proceedings of the 26th Australian Computer-Human Interaction Conference on Designing Futures: the Future of Design, (77-86)
- Naji J Interactive poetry Proceedings of the 8th European Conference on Interactive TV and Video, (51-54)
- Bardzell J Interaction criticism and aesthetics Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, (2357-2366)
- Stuart S (2018). From agency to apperception, Ethics and Information Technology, 10:4, (255-264), Online publication date: 1-Dec-2008.
- Helmreich S (2007). “Life Is a Verb”, Artificial Life, 13:2, (189-201), Online publication date: 1-Apr-2007.
- Anderson M (2003). Embodied cognition, Artificial Intelligence, 149:1, (91-130), Online publication date: 1-Sep-2003.
- Gromala D BioMorphic typography ACM SIGGRAPH 2002 conference abstracts and applications, (151-151)
- Rueb T Gathering crowds Proceedings of the 2000 ACM workshops on Multimedia, (25-26)
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