User:Laurier Rochon/readingnotes/will the real body please stand up

Sandy Stone > Will The Real Body Please Stand Up?

Bibliographical notes : Rosanne Allacuquere Stone, "Will the Real Body Please Stand Up: Boundary Stories About Virtual Cultures" in Michael Benedikt (Ed.) Cyberspace: First Steps (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991).

Before diving in the text, I recommend reading the Wikipedia page entry for the author (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandy_Stone_(artist)), it sheds a lot of light on the text, and makes it easier to understand where she is coming from.

"Allucquére Rosanne Stone (Sandy Stone) was born Zelig Ben-Natan in New York City. Her date of birth is uncertain but was probably in the late 1940s. She has stated that while a teen she was intensely averse to formal education, preferring to travel in the New England area auditing classes with university professors whose work she admired."...

Is nature and technology collapsing into each other?
Her interest in cyberspace is primarily about communities and how they work - because technology and culture constitute each other.
Also, virtual communities means embodiment -> interest for the body.
Electronic networks and the mode of interpersonal interaction they foster are a new manifestation of its old forms (conference calls, communities of letters, etc.)
'Virtual space' = imaginary locus of interaction created by communal agreement.
The body in virtual space : cannot be grounded anymore. (Ethic, trust and risk still continue, but in a different way)
Growing imbrication of humans and machines in new social forms : virtual systems.
In these systems, we still meet face to face. Only 'face' and 'meet' have different meanings.
A 'story' of virtual systems.
Epoch 1 : Texts (from mid-1600s), Epoch 2 : Electronic communication and entertainment media (1900+), Information technology (1960+), Virtual reality and cyberspace (1984+)

Epoch 1 : Robert Boyle creates a community of like-minded gentlemen to validate his scientific experiments.

Epoch 2 : Began with the invention of the telegraph. Apex of the period = Franklin Delano Roosevelt, with his 'fireside chats'. He used the radio to fit people inside his living room. It was now possible for millions of people to be 'present' in the same space.
In virtual systems, interface = mediates between the body and anassociated 'I'.

Epoch 3 : first virtual communities were BBSs.
CommuniTree : an extension of the participant's instrumentality into a virtual social space.
Conferencees of this saw themselves as agents of a new kind of social experiment. Computer = tool for social transformation by the way it reconfigures social interaction.
How is sitting at a terminal a social activity? It is an window onto a social space.
This tree got jammed by young boys fooling around on Mac computers from school. Young hackers tried to take the system down, and did so successfully. 'The barbarian hordes mowed us down'.
SIMNET from DARPA : immersive tank simulation program. People got really caught up in it - perhaps because of the low-res graphics which invites the user to get creative in respect to filling in the graphical holes.
HABITAT : made to run on a commodore-64 (inexpensive and accessible). Sounds like a MUD.
In this epoch, people have learned to delegate their agency to body-representatives that exist in an imaginal space.

Epoch 4 : Most significant event for this epoch : William Gibson's Neuromancer : it crystallized a new community.
Name-dropping moment here : 1 page of who did what with that team in what lab.
Gibson's work allowed people in the VR (or 'cyberspace' which came later) to organize themselves as a community.
The split between body and subject is growing and disappearing (?)
What does the author mean here by "nature"? :
Is it a construct made to keep technology visible and separate from our 'natural' selves? It is just there to maintain a boundary for political and economic ends?
The boundaries between the bodies and the rest of the world are undergoing radical refiguration, in part because of mediation from technology.
Author goes as far as saying that perhaps 'technology' doesn't exist either, and it has also been made up to keep categories separate. Can both really collapse?

Sex workers & VR engineers = both represent the human body through limited communication channels and coding cultural expectations [...]
The conception that these people have of the body will greatly influence the groups participating in VR.
As the demographic working on these systems is very specific (young males), the representation is very particular to this group.
Cyberspace is surely also a concretization of the psychoanalytically framed desire of the male to achieve the 'kinaesthetically exciting, dizzying sense' of freedom - the freedom of adolescent male embodiment.
In psychoanalytic terms, this power = mother.
Danger, the sense of threat as well as seductiveness that the computer can evoke, comes from both within and without. It derives from the complex interrelationships between human and computer, and this partially within the human; and it exits quasi-autonomously within the simulation. It constitutes simultaneously the senses of erotic pleasure and of loss of control over the body. Both also constitute a constellation of responses to the simulation that deeply engage fear, desire, pleasure, and the need for domination, subjugation and control.
Longing of the male for the female in cyberspace = cyborg envy
To penetrate cyberspace is to wear it - to put on the female - cybernetic act.
No matter how virtual the subject may become, there is always a body attached. Historically, body, technology and community constitute each other.
Is is useful to argue that most cultural production of intelligibility is about reading or writing and takes place through the mediation of texts. If we can apply textual analysis to the narrow-bandwidth modes of computers and phones, then we can examine the production of gendered bodies in cyberspace [...] - the legible body.
What separates the cyberspace communities from their ancestors is that the cyberspace communities often interact in real time.