Post by Laura Cunningham on Mar 23, 2016 19:23:54 GMT
One of the most salient features of our readings this week has been the concept of liminality and the destruction of the human/machine binary. The cyborg concept, which I think is well presented as a state of liminality, goes a long way in anthropology to help researchers exlore the intersection of new media and modern human populations. This concept hasn't been widely applied to social media; in fact most of the work in anthropology done on cyborg theory (such as Escobar's 1994 Cyberia) is rooted in the earliest stages of internet culture.
Through the application of liminality, I'm actually exploring the ways users interact with themselves and others through fields of practice, a concept popularized by Bordieu about thirty years ago. This theory suggests there are different fields individuals can belong to: cultural, political, economic. Each field will overlap and intersect with one another in different ways depending on a person's standing within these fields. I take a slightly different approach, arguing for a view of fields that can be conceptualized in the vein of Squires' counter-publics/Habermas' public sphere. With the inclusion of cyborg theory I believe we can view fields as sites of liminiality; in this way the communitas that Turner argues guides the necessary requirements to move from one stage of life to the next will forever be in flux, depending on the agents that are in play. Without a clear distinction between the human and the machine, we are all cyborgs in one way or another. Fuzzy cyborgs in constant flux: what we do in [real] life echoes in [digital] eternity.
Through the application of liminality, I'm actually exploring the ways users interact with themselves and others through fields of practice, a concept popularized by Bordieu about thirty years ago. This theory suggests there are different fields individuals can belong to: cultural, political, economic. Each field will overlap and intersect with one another in different ways depending on a person's standing within these fields. I take a slightly different approach, arguing for a view of fields that can be conceptualized in the vein of Squires' counter-publics/Habermas' public sphere. With the inclusion of cyborg theory I believe we can view fields as sites of liminiality; in this way the communitas that Turner argues guides the necessary requirements to move from one stage of life to the next will forever be in flux, depending on the agents that are in play. Without a clear distinction between the human and the machine, we are all cyborgs in one way or another. Fuzzy cyborgs in constant flux: what we do in [real] life echoes in [digital] eternity.
