Cyborg Manifesto

While reading the "Cyborg Manifesto" I became very confused on just how a robot and in any way reflect what a human is. In my mind a cyborg is no more than a machine that has a set plan in mind to do certain goals. As if they are programed from conception to do certain tasks. As a human we have emotion and feelings where as we can create cyborgs to have emotion and feel the point is do they really understand and create a memory of just what that pain is or the consequences of the actions they have just done to make this pain.

Another thing I questioned in this reading was how can you relate just feminism to the cyborgs. Even though we can program these cyborgs to be either feminine or masculine I feel like the cyborg is just an organism not necessarily a gender. The human DNA is what determines a persons gender, for the cyborg it is the pattern you encode into the cyborg. When I think about the difference between masucline and feminine I begin to think about what it is to be a man or a woman. With men, if you watch what kind of video games they play, you can see a need for conflict to be around them in order to achieve a "right" of being a man. With women, you see more of a want to change the environment they are in, maybe this is embeded into women to have more of a nurturing nature. Still I have a very hard time relating feminism alone to being a cyborg.

I guess we just have to ask ourselves what it is a cyborg actually is and what is its purpose and function in our world. As long as we do not become some kind of mad scientist and let our powers go out of control then I think we will be ok. But what happens when you lose control of what you have created? Frankenstein was a prime example of this even though he was not a cyborg.

The Man Who Fell to Earth...

In the last class we watched the film "The Man Who Fell to Earth" starring David Bowie, who is an alien who has come to earth in search of water because his planet has run short. While here we discover that he has many patents for new technological advances which could make him a very wealthy man and allow for him to possibly return to the world that he had come from.

This film poses a very interesting question to us all, what if there is life out there beyond what we know, are these beings more advanced than us? We have wondered for a very long time what exactly might exist beyond our reach out in space. So examples are crops fields having mysterious patterns left in them over night, flying saucer sightings, and some people claiming to be abducted in their sleep. Do these beings from other worlds really exist and are they trying to make contact with us or are they just observing until they decide to make a move at a later time? We should keep in mind that in the universe we are just a small minor particle within it and that many things could exist outside the world that we are trapped in. Many people will say that the government is just trying to hide things from us and that they are "weather balloons" that are part of a routine check, but there are just somethings you cannot fake. I think that we all have to keep an open mind about things that could exist around us and not lock ourselves into some kind of self bubble.

Yesterday I was reading an article on Yahoo.com about a girl from Buffalo, NY who was constantly being harassed by her ex-boyfriend through texts messages and online. She went as far as to get her phone number changed and changed her emails and online profiles for various websites. One night she receives a text message from an unknown number and who does it happen to be... her harassing ex-boyfriend saying, "you should keep to yourself and stay away from other people." This has now been termed as "textual harassment, and the fact that most of us would have a hard time ignoring it because the alert constantly going off until it is acknowledged. One problem is that most people must pay for text messages and as the victim said, "I am paying to be harassed".

Does this set an example of just less and less private our lives seem to be becoming with the aid of more and more forms of technology? Even when trying to create a new life and become annonymous we are unable to because in the end we are connected in some way back to that life that we were. Many people would argue that we do have complete control over what is happening with technology and how it is effecting our lives. For this college student though how was she to control the fact that someone was still looking for her for the pure enjoyment of harassment. I feel that this article sets a prime example of how we are not in control of how people can find us or what we are connected to via the internet. If someone is looking for you they will find you and no limits, that is why I do not trust the internet and I try to keep tabs and control over what may be posted about me. I know I cannot control everything but the world seems to be becoming smaller and smaller where people can know each other countries away from each other. With the growth of more and more technology we are seeing a shrinking in our everyday world and easier access to things that were once far far away and unexplored.