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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.
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
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.