Sunday, October 28, 2007

Extending your reach with cyborg politics

In Poster's discussion of public sphere politics and the internet, he comments on the evaporation of face-to-face contact in exchange for the electronic faux-meetings of videoconferencing and bulletin board posts. Within these arenas are brought the inherent politics of the program as well - as an analogy of the controlled inhibitions of a face-to-face meeting, there is a referent to the social pressures of writing wildly on a medium "the whole world can see" (enter obscenity masking and other forms of moderator automation - Judith Perolle's notion of machine control). While somewhat valuable to point out the Internet as a "postmodern technology" (a conglomeration of related and unrelated materials unified by protocol and hierarchical structure), the concept of cyborg politics is even more pertinent. It implies not only an extension of the individual's abilities to interact, influence, and ultimately manipulate others through technological venues, but also the simplification and reduction of task sets, the skilled operation of these functions, and a holistic reliance on their existence. Without the cybernetic appendages of the individual, the politics would be useless. That can be said for both the politician and the "voter", meaning that both the promoter of ideas and the viewer of the concepts must be present on either end in order to experience the products, possibly being 'infected' by one another. Cyborg politics is largely about the maximization of node participation, with effective participation becoming transparent to the user - simply one more message within their daily umweldt; these connections feeling as natural as a handshake. With extension becomes unification by extension - webloggers included. By design, it is easy to escape the association of a blog ( make your site look professional, don't be personal, and don't use Blogger), as well as the freely associating your amateur journalism as a blog (send your ethically-viable posts everywhere you can, even when you are walled by a spam detector). There is a tricky balance in play that sacrifices credibility for increased viewership; appearances are [almost] everything.

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