In Memory of My Feelings or How I learned to Stop Programming Myself and Actually Let my Embodied Experiences and Knowledge about the World do the Wor

A lover of Dr. Strangelove anyone???

First off, I would just like to say that I really dig the Shaviro readings. I am happy that I spent more than an hour’s wage on the book.

There were two ideas that Sharivo discusses that I found to be particularly interesting. The first was that of the idea of technology being able to re-contextualize our sense of embodiment and emotional response. The piece about Warhol’s experience with love spoke well to the idea that with technology comes a certain amount of awareness about the world around us that man arguably did not have prior or has been missing for a while.

Just the very idea that through the interaction with TV, the concept of love meant something different to Warhol is testimate to the idea that technology is not leading to a disembodied man, but possibly a man who is able to connect to himself differently through the aid of a tool that McLuhan and others have discussed being an “extension” or “prosthesis.” Through being able to see the patterns being fed to him about how he is programmed by society to feel about love and other abstract (but highly ruling emotions in) his life, he was able to see the patterns being fed to him and break away/become numb to their influence.

Letting our experiences with all the potentials of technology bring us out of the “flow” of how we have learned to feel, listen and react ties partially into my first blog, when I talked about society being a machine, in which we are given specific scripts, in order to make sure that we can perform specific task and perpetuate the existing operations of things. It is interesting to think of using technology and over-exposure to take us out of our understanding of our selves and use technology to show us how mechanical we have begun.

In fact, the more of Shaviro I was reading, the more I began to wonder if the concerns being discussed about the effects of technology come out of some sort of misunderstood mirror, where we are seeing where we were, instead of where we are going.

Looking at some of the readings that we have gone over in the past few weeks has really shown that we have been using technology to establish and obtain individual wants, needs and desires in ways that we have not been able to before. In a growing way, it both reinforces and breaks up the sense of dependence that exist within societies and gives people not only the potential to think about pushing boundaries (whether physical or psychological) in a way that was not previously thought possible, but also increasingly putting the means to carry out these potentials in increasingly accessible ways.