Foundations of Technical Communication: Technology Presentation Assignment

I am giving a technology presentation on Survey Monkey, which is a tool I've been intending to learn for some time in order to conduct survey-based research. Here is my one-page handout (embedded here) that provides an overview of what I discussed in the F2F class on 15 October.

Here are some useful links for the project as well:


Company Background
Company Sold April 2009
Pricing
Terms of Use
User Manual
Best Practices for Survey Design
Usability/Accessibility Guide

Philosophy of Technology: Haraway Response

"A Cyborg Manifesto" (1991)

 Background info on Haraway 

 

Reading Response:

A manifesto is a call to action, a verbal slap, an effort to use language to bring about change, and in Haraway’s case, political change. Haraway's essay is a response to those who (during the 1970s and 1980s) sought to define what woman truly is, believing that if the identity of woman could be defined, then a ground of collective political action might be secured (known as "identity politics"). Haraway finds this problematic and proposes instead that we are all hybrids.

She attempts to create what she calls "an ironic political myth" which combines postmodernism with socialist feminism. First, she introduces and defines the "cyborg." A cyborg is a:

• Cybernetic organism
• Hybrid of machine and organism
• Creature of both fiction and lived social reality

The cyborg for Haraway is a metaphor for the postmodernist interest in identity as well as the reality of living with new technology. The cyborg is a direct result of a world that has begun to live within and alongside machines—the line between the human body and the machine has been blurred. And it is a product of new media convergence (a result of cyberspace, artificial limbs, pacemakers, chat rooms).

Haraway is interested in revealing the ambiguity and irrelevance of nature-culture binarisms in the cyborg age. In fact, she also reveals that "natural" was never even so. She charts the differences between "comfortable old hierarchical dominations" (432) which have the appearance of "naturalness" since they are so embedded in our Western cultural consciousness, and the "scary new networks"(432) which came about after World War II. Haraway’s chart allows her to point out the problems with assumptions of a "natural" past: “the objects on the right-hand side cannot be coded as ‘natural’, a realization which subverts naturalistic coding for the left-hand side as well. We cannot go back ideologically or materially. It’s not just that ‘god’ is dead; so is the ‘goddess’" (433).

The cyborg, according to Haraway, resists what has gone before; it is more than the sum of its parts. In addition, the cyborg "is a creature in a post-gender world; it has no truck with bisexuality, pre-oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labour, or other seductions to organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity" (430).

Haraway feels that there are three major boundary breakdowns in the formation of the cyborg. The first is between human and animal: "Biology and evolutionary theory over the past two centuries have simultaneously produced modern organisms as objects of knowledge and reduced the line between humans and animals to a faint trace re-etched in ideological struggle or professional disputes between life and social science"(431). The result is human animality or animal human.

The second boundary breakdown is between animal-human (organism) and machine. Not only are our household machines becoming more autonomous and taking on personalities and human features, but humans are coupling with machines for medical purposes (pacemakers, dialysis, artificial limbs and joints, hearing aids) and for research purposes (as is the case with Kevin Warwick, http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.02/warwick.html).

The third boundary breakdown is between the physical/organic/animate and nonphysical/inorganic/inanimate. Haraway notes: "Our best machines are made of sunshine; they are all light and clean because they are nothing but signals, electromagnetic waves, a section of a spectrum, and these machines are eminently portable, mobile…. People are nowhere near so fluid, being both material and opaque"(431). Today’s machines are ubiquitous and invisible; they carry huge amounts of data on tiny chips hidden somewhere behind an attractive surface. This ethereal invisibility renders machines potent weapons: "They are as hard to see politically as materially. They are about consciousness—or its simulation"(432).

Haraway attemps to use the cyborg myth as “one important route for reconstructing socialist-femminist politics” (434) by seeing from two perspectives: 1) that “a cyborg world is about the final imposition of a grid of control on the planet,” and 2) that “a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints"(432). The solution, she suggests, is to see from both perspectives at once (double vision); to be aware and critical of both aspects of the cyborg in the development of political identity. “Cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves. This is a dream not of a common [feminist] language, but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia.”

Philosophy of Technology: Chapter 50 (Chellis Glendinning)

Notes toward a Neo-Luddite Manifesto (1990)

Background notes:

• European-American author of creative nonfiction, licensed psychotherapist specializing in recovery from post-traumatic stress , and political activist
• pioneer in the field of ecopsychology, a proponent of land-based culture, and a critic of technological society
• Alexander Graham Bell her ancestor. Her brother is named after him: Alexander Bell Glendinning

Reading response:
This was a compellingly clear, short, and succinct article. As such, however, it was not totally convincing. I know that it takes the idea to the extreme, in order to make an argument for people troubled by and resistant to modern technology.

Two sections were particularly interesting to me:

1. Page 604 l-h column, when she states that neo-luddites are not anti-technology but rather that they oppose the kinds of technologies that are destructive to human lives and communities--how can she distinguish in advance that technology will be destructive? We rarely know the potential or unintended uses of some technologies. And what of technologies that have both negative and positive impacts?
   
2. Page 604, "learning to critique technology demands fully examining its sociological context, economic ramifications, and political meanings"--I agree with this. Too often we ignore the negative effects of technology.

I wonder how she would suggest we dismantle nuclear, chemical, genetic, electromagnetic, computer technologies. First, they seem too established within society to be dismantled. Second, I'm not sure it's even physically possible, or a good idea. My father was an engineer who worked with water pollution from some of these technologies. I doubt we could effectively dismantle these technologies without causing more harm to the environment. So perhaps her article should not be taken literally?

Philosophy of Technology: Chapter 49 (Michel Foucault)

Panopticism (1978)

Foucault begins this essay with a  discussion of the separation measures taken against people with the plague, and he compares these with those of lepers. Both were separated from society as a result of fear, but plague victims were controlled by segmentation (groupings) and order and discipline and power structures, while lepers were merely separated (individualized). Foucault uses this history to set up how discipline and punishment function in modern society.

Foucault focuses on Jeremy Bentham's panopticon. Plague measures were needed to protect society: the panopticon allows power to operate efficiently. The panopticon offers permanent visibility, ensuring homogeneous effects of power. Bentham believed that power should be visible and unverifiable. The prisoner can always see the tower but he cannot communicate or see other prisoners, and he never knows whether he is being observed. Foucault points out that the panopticon is a machine for "dissociating the see/being seen dyad: in the peripheric ring, one is totally seen, without ever seeing; in the central tower, one sees everything without ever being seen." He calls it a "laboratory of power"--a place where the machine can be used to carry out experiments using observation. The panopticon is a figure of political technology. I love this passage:

"The panoptic mechanism is not simply a hinge, a point of exchange between a mechanism of power and a function; it is a way of making power relations function in a function, of making a function function through these power relations" (594-95).

The most fascinating part of the panopticon is this idea that it is a transparent building--"in which the exercise of power may be supervised by society as a whole." According to Foucault, our society has moved from one of spectacle to one of surveillance--we are in the panoptic machine. In our time, the state controls such methods of coercion and operates them throughout society. The development of a disciplinary society involves socio-economic factors, particularly population increase and economic development.

Foucault assumes that all citizens of modern society are entitled to make demands on the state. However, he also argues that the state cannot be separated or understood without the mechanisms that also control and examine the citizen. Schools, factories, hospitals, and prisons resemble the panopticon in that they examine pupils, workers, patients, and prisoners--they classify them as individuals and try to make them conform to a norm. And the modern citizen spends much of his life in at least some of these institutions--"we are in the panoptic machine!"

Philosophy of Technology: Chapter 48 (Hubert L. Dreyfus)

"Anonymity versus Commitment: The Dangers of Education on the Internet" (1999)

Background information:

• professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley
• interests include phenomenology, existentialism and the philosophy of both psychology and literature, as well as the philosophical implications of artificial intelligence 
• educated at Harvard and considered a leading interpreter of the work of Edmund Husserl, Michel Foucault, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, but especially of Martin Heidegger
• authored the controversial 1972 book What Computers Can't Do, revised first in 1979, and then again in 1992 with a new introduction as What Computers Still Can't Do
• has a reputation as a Luddite, but he doesn't believe that AI is fundamentally impossible; only that the current research is fatally flawed. He argues that to get a device (or devices) with human-like intelligence would require them to have a human-like being-in-the-world, which would require them to have bodies more or less like ours, and social acculturation (i.e. a society) more or less like ours. 

Reading response:
Dreyfus uses Kierkegaard's notion of the dangers and opportunities of the Press to critiques the Internet. He asks, "What contribution can the World Wide Web make to educators?"

In answering this question, Dreyfus uses Kierkegaard's 3 stages--aesthetic, ethical, and religious--to show that only the aesthetic and ethical are possible with information technology, and that the religious is undermined.

He gives several attributes shared between the Press and the Web:

• both level all qualitative disctinctions (all text is equal)
• both create the Public and an absence of responsibility
• both provide anonymity and no risks, which is why we are attracted to them

Dreyfus suggests that the most important commitments in our lives are those that are unconditional--and he gives the following list: politics, religion, love, law (!), and music--because there's risk and loss/grief in losing these things. He asks what role information technology can play in encouraging/supporting unconditional commitments, and concludes that while IT does not prohibit them, it does inhibit them.

I was following along with all of the points of the article, until this last. Dreyfus lost me just before his conclusion, when he states, and I paraphrase:

If Kierkegaard is right, for the cyber-world to avoid despair, it would have to find a way to cancel its risk-free attraction by supporting and encouraging unconditional commitments and strong identities in the real world where risk and disappointment are inevitable. (583)


He goes on to insist that "education at its best must be based on apprenticeship" and that "one can only learn by imitation of the style" of a master. While I recognize the value of learning from mentors, I don't agree with this entirely. What about hackers? What about successful distance education? Aren't these risky and unconditional passions? Or are these the very things Dreyfus means?

I doubt it, given his last sentence: "As far as I can see," [which is a telling statement in itself, I think], "learning by apprenticeship can work only in the nearness of the classroom and laboratory; never in cyberspace." I can't wait to hear some of my classmates refute this! And they will be passionate about it!