GIST

this time w/out the word button:

 According to the New York Times article, "Smartphones Now Ringing for Women" by Laura M. Holson, there is an increasing number of women who are choosing to use smartphones. 

At the time the article was written, the number of women who were using smartphones was about 10.4 million, a number that was twice the previous year's. The number of users has undoubtedly grown since then. 

According to Clark, humans are natural born cyborgs, ready to embrace technology. While in class on Thursday, I found our discussion of human extended cognition, the role of agency on technology, the natural desire for humans to seek technological advances, our prejudice against technology, and our nature/ nurture debate of our use/ relations with technology to be rather interesting. However, I am concerned with human growing relations to technology. In primitive times, we did not have as much electronically powered resources, but I wonder if our obsession/ dependence on it is changing the way our brains are structured.

 One of my favorite family stories happened last Easter, when my Mom was taking pictures of me and all my cousins outside. My youngest cousin, about two and walking but barely speaking at the time, kept breaking away from the group between shots and hanging on my mom's arms. No one could figure out what she wanted until my mom put the camera down for a minute and my little cousin immediately started looking at the pictures. My mom couldn't stop marveling about the idea that someone so young already understood this technology, having only mastered digital photography very recently herself.

  I found Clark’s article fascinating and eye-opening. I have always felt a bit apprehensive about the future of technology and what its advancement might mean for the future of us as people and a society. I was deeply troubled by an article I read a few years ago that posited a future in which human-technology synthesis would result in immortal ‘people’. Although quite a large—if not unbelievable—claim I still felt unnerved by the article’s painstaking and convincing analysis of this future. A future with such uncharacteristically ‘human’ advancements is unsurprisingly disconcerting.

On Day 3, "Natural Born Cyborgs,"
We first watched the Selarc video, which mentioned the idea of the body as a sculptural medium and an evolutionary architecture. Many people in the class seemed disturbed and/or intrigued by the art. Thinning the boundary between self and other makes us feel existentially uncomfortable.

We reflected on our initial postings and the Clark reading:

 It’s odd how our relationship with technology and becoming cyborgs with technology based/affected ‘scaffolding’ is something Clark describes as being exclusive to the human mind, or something that defines us. Being ‘primed to seek’ helpful technology seems a lot like a survival instinct, but strangely Clark speaks against evolutionary psychology. A lot of the intuitive integration of technology even simple ones such the multiplication tables he talks about on page 6, are things that we get familiar with not because we naturally absorb them, but because we feel they will benefit us (or there’s punishment for not memorizing them.)

An idea that Clark did not address in his discussion was the access to this new technology. I agree with Clark that humans are “primed” to use tools or technology, especially if we think of tools in a broader sense than just electronics; however I am not sure if that predisposition will translate into the kind of future he described in his hypothetical diary. He implies that our integration with machines is a natural process but to me it seems that if new technologies are developed that integrate body with tools those with more money, power, and connections will have access to these new technologies. Isn’t it possible that these new technologies could create a further divide between haves and have nots?

 Part of our discussion this week centered on the nature versus nurture debate, and whether humans are, as Clark claims, “primed to seek … nonbiological [sic] resources” (6). I agree that we are easily able to adopt and adapt to new technologies and survival aids; in other words, “primed” to use tools that suit our needs. As our needs change and grow more complex, so do our tools. However, I take issue with Clark's claim because it reflects only one part of human nature (however one decides to define “human”).