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Cybersex
-text
Trudy Barber
©2002
University of Kent@Canterbury
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The
Internet and Computer Mediated Communications (CMCs) have radically changed
the way we view, read, and interact with text.
The website,
with its foundation of animated, interactive and exciting imagery enables
the projection of identity through font choice, animation settings, colour
and interactive imagery.
Some specific
websites enable the computer user to become sexually involved with text-as-sexual-identity
and text itself becomes interpreted as sexual space and signifier. |
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Cyberspace
is an electronic projection of the self, using primarily two technologies.
1:Virtual
Reality via Immersion body suits and head mounted displays (HMD): A
three dimensional computer projected interaction enabler. Representations
such as avatars of the self can be viewed, experienced and manipulated.
Feedback can be akin to a hallucinatory experience.
2:The Internet via the Personal
Computer (PC): A graphic user interface (GUI). A catalyst that
enables global communications, not necessarily requiring the authentic
identity of the user. Representations of the self can be psychically manipulated
through image and text. |
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THE
COLLAPSE OF SPACE AND TIME |
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Virtual
reality and communications technology enables us to examine 'our
very sense of reality' (Heim 1993:59) |
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What
is a transgressive reading of technological determinism?
This involves looking at how people
have used technology in a way that it was not originally intended
for, since the Enlightenment period and including the Industrial Revolution. |
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The autonomous
sexualising of technology.
TECHNO-FETISHISM
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Notions
of 'otherness' introduced by new technologies like the telegraph enabled
people to experience new alternate psychical spaces. People in Europe and
America could experience the sense of otherness through travel, and express
and describe their experiences by using the telegraph. Those who remained
at home in turn translated those experiences through a projection of the
imagination. Stories of a romantic and sexual nature resulted, for example
a popular novel written by Ella Cheever Thayer, entitled Wired Love:
a romance of dots and dashes in 1880. This novel used
the oldest form of human communication, that of love and sexuality, expressed
through the vehicle of the most contemporary form of technological communications
of the time. The
motto at the front of the book reads:
' "The old,
old story," - in a new, new way".'
Ms Cheever Thayer was not in doubt
of the intense power and transgressive sexual potential of new technologies.
She had recognised an exciting alternative use of the telegraph. In the
following excerpt from her novel, Cheever Thayer unknowingly writes an
early-romanticised description of the telegraph that could also be a description
of a later invention, the Internet. |
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Miss
Nattie Rogers, telegraph operator, lived, as it were, in two worlds. The
one her office, dingy and curtailed as to proportions, but from whence
she could wander away, through the medium of that slender telegraph wire,
on a sort of electric wings, to distant cities and towns; where, although
alone all day, she did not lack social intercourse, and where she could
amuse herself if she chose, by listening to and speculating upon the many
messages of joy or of sorrow, of business and of pleasure, constantly going
over the wire.' (Cheever Thayer 1880: 25) |
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'With
the mind-boggling multiplication of media technologies in the twentieth
century (not to mention what we are likely to witness in the twenty-first),
it becomes imperative, in institutions of higher learning especially, to
understand the multiple capacities of subjects constituted by various media,
instead of blindly and repeatedly insisting that only one media - the book
- and only one set of cultural skills - the imagination or rationality
- deserves recognition as intelligence.'
(Poster 2001:84) |
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THE BOOK
IS NOT YET DEAD!
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For more
information about Trudy Barber click below.
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