The Body Electric: e-lag, Penelope

Complex and other e-pathologies

Derrick de KerckhoveMcLuhan Program

Faculty of Information StudiesUniversity of Toronto

Three eras

The telegraph: a marriage between language and

electricity

The technobiology of electricity

• Electricity is both within and without the human body (CNS projected outside)

• In the analogue mode, electricity emulates muscular functions of the body

• In the digital mode, it emulates cognition

• All digital appliances are extensions of our senses and our communications capabilities

• Some of them such as the cell phone bring the electric grid back to the body…

The technobiology of wirelessness

• Wireless means permanent, ubiquitous access to all our extensions

• The cellular phone spells the integration of the whole world within the personal body space of the user

• Wearable computing heralds the quasi internalization of this process

• Cyborgism (techno-romanticism)

Three cyborgsSteve Mann

Stelarc

Kevin Warwick

The body electric

The body electric• An augmented

body• Fuzzy boundaries• With Wi-Fi, total

interconnectivity• Restructuring our

sensory life• Changing our use

of time and space• A bionic condition

Date:   Sun, 21 Mar 2004 18:51:53 +0000 Subject: Francesco From:   roy <roy.ascott@btinternet.com> To:     <d.dekerckhove@utoronto.ca>

• Derrick

Disaster struck last week – a critical crash corrupted/erased all my email files. I’m back online now but it put things out slightly.

Francesco Monico might like to get in touch with me directly. The Planetary Collegium website is up and running and should explain things pretty thoroughly -  but of course I can clarify any uncertainties, as well as making sure there would be a good fit between the area he wants to research and the expertise etc we have to offer.

Best wishes

Roy__________________________________________ Professor Roy Ascott

• DirectorThe Planetary CollegiumUniversity of PlymouthPlymouth PL4 8AAUnited Kingdom+44 (0)7967148719+44 (0)1752 232558http://www.planetary-collegium.net

New bionic ailments…

• Not talking about clinical issues, e.g. radiations re: cell-phones, eyesight and migraine problems re: overuse of screen, back-aches re: bad ergonomics of PCs

• Not talking about what happens to the technology itself (obsolescence, breakdowns, spam, viruses, black-outs)

• Only about what happens to us as we use such an intimate array of technologies

Addictions

• Whatever it is, once you are hooked, you can no more live without it

• PC (as in ‘chained to my PC’)

• Cellular phone• E-mail• Wi-Fi• SMS• Social Software

(LinkedIn, Orkut)• Games• Blogs• Chats

Symptoms of Internet addiction

• 1) Using the online services everyday without any skipping.2) Loosing track of time after making a connection.3) Going out less and less.4) Spending less and less time on meals at home or at work, and eats in front of the monitor.5) Denying spending too much time on the Net.6) Others complaining of your spending too much time in front of the monitor.7) Checking on your mailbox too many times a day.8) Thinking you have got the greatest web site in the world and dying to give people your URL.9) Logging onto the Net while already busy at work.10) Sneaking online when spouse or family members not at home, with a sense of relief.

• Occupational impairment due to Internet Addiction:

Anxieties

• E-lag: guilt of not having answered tons of e-mail

• Fear of virus attack

• Passworditis• Fear of giving out

card numbers• Broadband anxiety

Depressions

• Weathering down-time and…

• Lack of connectivity• Loss of self-

confidence to decreasing e-mail

• Information-overload from increasing e-mail

• Losing unsaved content to unpredictable crashes

Phobias • Cyberphobia• Cyberphobia is the fear of

computers. This term was coined in 1985 as an aversion or anxiety caused by technology (Harris). A Dell Computer study shows 55% of people have some fear of technology. 36% of office computer users feel their skill levels are inadequate.

• Technophobia• Technostress• Matrix

Fear of Matrix

• Fear real-life Matrix will be monitoring you By MADELEINE BARANDAILY NEWS WRITER

• The Matrix has arrived. The most massive database surveillance program in history, the Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange could soon offer authorities extensive information on the lives of New Yorkers.

• Potentially more information than they'd ever expect: past addresses and phone numbers; marriage and divorce records; arrest records; real estate information; photographs of neighbors and business associates; car make, model and color; hunting and fishing licenses; and more. Much more.

Contaminations• Viruses were invented in the early

1980s, and while historians differ in their opinions as to which was first, it may have been Cloner, a 1981 Apple II virus whose only symptom was that it occasionally displayed a poem onscreen. Shortly thereafter, researcher Fred Cohen published a technical paper called "Computer Viruses-Theory and Experiments," and by 1986 a number of new viruses were starting to appear "in the wild," as computer security experts like to say.

Virtually all of these viruses were spread by the relatively inefficient means of floppy disks. Computers in which many different floppy disks were used-as in campus computer centers-tended to be the centers of contagion. It was not until the IBM Christmas virus (which probably spurred this NEWSWEEK story) that an infection was seen actively spreading through a network-in this case, IBM's worldwide collection of mainframes.

• Spam• Cookies

Obsessive-compulsive behaviors

• Owning the latest equipment, the highest performance (My CPU is bigger than yours)

• Wi-Finitis• ‘Googlis’• File-saving

Neuroses

• Fear of invasion of privacy

• Penelope Complex

• DDD (Deletion Deficit Disorder)

• “Surfing for symptoms”

Spam rage

• Spam rage drives some e-mailers to extremes By Jon Swartz, USA TODAY

• SAN FRANCISCO — Charles Booher was so mad, he did what others have longed to do: He told a spammer to stop — or else. But the Silicon Valley tech worker went too far, prosecutors say. Last year, he allegedly threatened to shoot and torture an employee of a Canadian company that spammed him, court documents say.

• The testicular cancer survivor was especially enraged at spam touting penis enlargements, he says.

Identity crises

• Emigration of mind from head to screen

• Digital persona• Blogger• Gender bending• Anonymous poking or

pseudos handles Mark Ngui

Partial or total lobotomies

• Hard-disk loss (who keeps back-up anyway)

• Unexplained and sudden crashes at the most interesting moment

• Wipe-out of whole directories (Eudora)

• Your system may need reconfiguring, but so do you…

• A stressful condition

How can we deal with it ?

• Guru meditation # 787848798478794

• Is there a tecchie in the house ?

• Hope (for an improved round of technology, i.e., XP over Millennium)

Do we need a new specialization in psychotherapy

• Adding to the Bios program

Total, ubiquitous, broadband,

always on, mobile access

Change of self-image (body-

image)Change of scale

Change of physical distribution

Change of time (macro and micro

scales)

What is health in the Digital Era ?

In the electric age, we wear all mankind as our skin

Estienne 1545

Vesalius 1543

Spieghel 1627

Mascagni 1823

Brödel c.1910Brödel c.1910

Wishart c.1930Wishart c.1930

OUTS

We shape our tools and…

…thereafter, our tools shape us Marshall McLuhan

Whatever Stelarc is looking at goes on line for

anyone to see

Stelarc connects his

CNS to someone

else’s via the www

Warwick implants

sensors for contextual cues from

the environme

nt