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Desire In Cyberspace
Lots of terms are used in connection cyberspace, but "sexy" and "desire" are not usually among them. Allucquerre Roseanne Stone, an assistant professor and director of the Interactive Multimedia Laboratory (ACTlab) at the University of Texas in Austin has changed that in her exotic, surprising, and well..sexy..new book: "The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age."
This provocative volume isn't quite what we've come to expect from academic writing about the Net and the Web. But it's haunting and long overdue. It's also brave, lunging past the blarney about porn and getting right at the erotic nature of techno-desire in cyberspace, which often has nothing to do with sex. Stone's premise is that there's a lot of desire involved with the interface of technology and individuals.
She writes about phone sex; the atmosphere and rituals of busy cyberlabs; the electronic isolation of browsing and the trial of a man accused of having raped a women by seducing one of her multiple personalities online. She couples the electronic voice-box that the astrophysicist Stephen Hawkins uses to communicate and the voice-only techniques of sex workers to wonder precisely where the body ends these days and software and hardware begins. This is a mesmerizing report from one of the unexplored fringes of the cyber-experience.
Stone writes engagingly about the high adventure of going online -- of uttering the vision and owning it. This adventure, she writes, "is our future, as we immerse ourselves ever more deeply in our own technologies; as the boundaries between our technologies and ourselves continue to implode; as we inexorably become creatures that we cannot even now imagine. It is a moment which simultaneously holds immense threat and immense promise. I don't want to lose sight of either, because we need to guide ourselves -- remember 'cyber' means steer -- in all our assembled forms and multiple selves right between the two towers of promise and danger, of desire and technology. In the space between them lies the path to our adventure at the dawn of the virtual age, the adventure which belongs to our time and which is ours alone."
Stone has definitely hit on something. Without question, there is something exotic about the intersection of the individual and cyberspace, and longings and desire, sexual and otherwise, that these often amazing and wondrous encounters evoke. Going online can be profoundly spiritual as well as erotic, but neither is explored very often or well amidst the culture's obession with pornography, gee-whiz gadgetry and dot.com hype.
From her enchanging introduction: "Sex, Death and Machinery, or How I Fell in Love with My Prothesis" Stone captures the imagination and delivers an intelligent and exotic romp through cyberspace and the imagination.
Purchase this book at Fatbrain.
The question is, why was this book (and Katz's glowing review) written? Is it because this subject is an interesting one to study, or is it an attempt at self-justification through over studying? A few years ago, a research group announced that chocolate is good for you. Many loved the study, 'cause it told them to do what they wanted. This is the same kind of thing. By wrapping porn & etc. in an academic package, you take away the stigma, which seems to be the point of both the book and Katz.
Look at our current presidential election. Both sides are spending millions and millions on being able to insulate their canidate while progecting (through TV) a message they think will sell. Thus our campaigns have been reduced to image sales, as opposed to the selling ideas.
So it's not whose idea is the best, it's who sounds better, or who flames better, or who looks better.
The Internet has the potential to change some things because of the free flow of information. The Internet also requires a certain amount of intelligence to use as most communication is currently written. This medium allows people to quickly comment and point out when people's personas aren't "fitting together" which is important because traditional media can be bought or biased. The Internet on the other hand allows many voices to be heard. The problems in the end are
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
"Man is least himself when he talks in his own person Give him a mask and he'll tell you the truth" - Oscar Wilde
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end communication
are you ready for this. In the real world, you're HAVING SEX.
;-)
online? you're doing what we like to call "flogging the one eyed wonder weasel" - no online experience will ever replace the sexual experience. It's like comparing a recording to hearing a band live.
it would only sound the same to those who don't listen to music much
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
What does she think of goatse.cx?
I always knew there were two astrophysicists who needed voice boxes. There's Stephen Hawking the popular one and the little known porn star Stephen Hawkins
icqqm [ICQ:11952102]
Indeed, online encounters can be more erotic, as you are forced to rely solely on the mind and cannot take a short cut to the body.
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Private Essayist
My hand has its own email address. My girlfriend has her own account on my box so I can finger her.
Don't believe anything I say. I crash test crack pipes for a living.
This book, as Jon stated, is in it's third printing. Which means it has been out for a while. In the first paragraph of the actual review he calls it "sexy...new book" The second paragraph says "It's haunting and long overdue". Well perhaps if you were better read it would not be new and overdue to you. Or perhaps you just needed to justify having cybersex with someone, I don't know.
The ultimate erotisism for many people is intelligence and being able to express yourself. Over the net, for most people, words are all you have. The better and clearer you can make yourself understood the more attractive people will find you sight unseen.
This is the medium that my girlfriend and I met on several years ago. And we both agree that we would not have given the other much of a chance if we met face to face first.
I don't especially mind either postmodernism (if by that you mean Lyotard, say) or obfuscation, but what I can't stand is cyberdrool - the portentous rhapsodizing of boring people trying to write interestingly. Academics can be especially prone to this, for perhaps obvious reasons; and the web is a real lure for devotees of pretend excitement. I don't know why it is that gushy narcissism has become the predominant tone of highbrow discourse about the web, but it bodes ill...
There's more excitement for me, a non-mathematician and non-computer scientist, in about twenty pages of almost anything by Donald Knuth (even the TeXBook!) than in the whole of Sherry Turkle...
"Knowledge is the continuation of ignorance by other means"
Actually, it could be argued than an inability to have frank discussions about sex is at the root of this problem too. Read Scientific American from last month or the month previous. Excellent article.
For economic reasons, almost all the women in the cities end up selling sex, but none will admit to it, even to medical personel who promise confidentiality. And the sexual fashion there is a for a form of sex that makes transmission of AIDS even more likely.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
That said, I wonder how it has held up to time. The web was in its infancy (or not even existent) when Stone began writing this book. The nature of porn online has changed, becoming far more salient than in the early 1990s. Some of the forms of technological desire remain, but they've changed, and others may have disappeared or completely transformed.
I'm glad people are thoughtful about our intersections with technology. I wish obfuscated postmodernism wasn't the only mode of that thought.
-schussat
The hour of noon has passed. Let us go and get some Kentucky Fried Chicken.
Sex is a proper thing. People get obsessed with it because we (the American society) is torn between accepting it and covering it up. Cultures that accept sex as a natural part of human existence don't have the problems we do.
And, I personally lump Pat Buchanan with Art Bell. The only reason they are useful is to serve as a bad example.
...phil
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
What is more interesting is the alienation about going on-line. This gets freaky when sociologists start to look at cultures such as Japan where young people are starting to no longer communicate directly with each other. Instead they "interface" through games and alter egos presented in those games.
In the end, isn't it Humanity we want to preserve? Isn't the net just another tool, but not a "be all end all"? The net will really start to loose it's sex appeal when your significant other CAN ONLY talk to you through their new character, ultra femme II.
Sometimes HUMAN interaction without the electronic filters is the sexiest of all.
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
Another poster already said this, but I think it's worth repeating because it's a great point and is also a premise for my post -
All the net really provides is another medium for communications, one that is not quite as good as conventional methods, but the key is that it provides anonymity. The poster compared this to the French idea that masks during sex are erotic because they provide anonymity. There's some sort of excitement in this risk-free form of erotic play. It's all fun and no danger, with no fear of rejection or failure.
In the case of sex using masks, the anonymity is there but the difference is that there's some passionate love going on there. The two lovers are responding to each other at a level below cognition. Their not overtly thinking about what their doing so much, they just act. It's more instinctual.
On the other hand, erotic play online is very cognitive event. i.e. "Marsha551 pulls l33thax0r towards her". l33thax0r would have to visualize this event and then be aroused. It's totally different. The source of arousal is in fact l33thax0r himself. He'd have to think about it, determine that the act is erotic based on his subjective tastes and then consciously arouse himself. At least much more so than in a real life encounter. To me, the world of online eroticism seems to be a cross somewhere between fantasy and reality. If your not one to fantasize, it won't really appeal to you.
Maybe as techology evolves the medium for communication will become more effective. Like in some sci-fi flics where you plug your nervous system into a network of some sort. Then online encounters could get closer to the reality. The only thing that would keep people from pursuing a real encounter in this case would be the anonymity. The author was sort of getting at this but kept using stupid euphamisms like "boundaries between our technologies and ourselves continue to implode". WTF is that?? Sounds like a bad verzion commercial. The author also claims that as more technology develops, we will be "become creatures that we cannot now even imagine." We'll still be human, we aren't going to morph into some other "creatures" too quickly. Human nature will still dicate how we behave. We'll be as human as ever, but will have some more tools to work and communicate with. Sure this will change how we do things, but not fundamentally who we are. Katz and the a Mrs. Stone need to get out of their fantasy worlds and start giving us readers something that pertains more to our common reality.
http://www.elsewhere.org/cgi-bin/postmodern/ - the postmodern essay generator.
I must admit to being a bit of a chat addict, i dont go in for the whole cybersex thing, so perhaps im not typical, but to me the big attraction of the mediium is not the anonymity, but the fact that its a genuinely unique form of communication.
......the earlier posters analogy of the masque ball is, in this light, entirely appropriate.
One of the big topics i studied in linguistics was the diferences between verbal and textual communication, and the linguistic complexity/diversity that this caused. As most internet chat is real-time text communication, and this form of communication is still relatively new, and for most of us an entirely post-childhood experience, there is great room for creativity and personalisation in the use of the medium; perticuarly how {if at all} you choose to represent the non-lexical signals usually communicated by intonation, gesticulation et al in speech.
To me it is the ability to shape these linguistic conventons that leads to the ability to shape social conventions, that leads to the feeling of freedom associated with the medium. Perhaps it is this social freedom, along with are sociatally ingrained obsesion with, and lack of social competency in, sexual matters that leads to the supposed eroticism.