Today's Posthumanism, Ignorance or Freedom?

In reading N. Catherine Hayles' How We Became Posthuman, I found myself drawing connections between Hayles' arguments, and the Atlantic's much discussed "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" In that article, author Nicholas Carr articulates what Hayles calls her third narrative, that "the human is giving way to a different construction called the posthuman" (2). Carr doesn't say that he is becoming posthuman, but rather that he can feel himself changing as a result of his interaction (and arguably dependency) on new internet technologies.

Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think.

Carr is not alone in this assessment. In fact, Carr's observances have been echoed so extensively since the article's publication, that one might indeed judge it as a sign not of things to come, but of things that already happened, namely a transition towards some semblance of the Haylian posthuman.

For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought.

To ignore for a moment Carr's metaphor "the stuff of thought" which it seems gets to the struggle between medium and information (as Hayles, the latter cannot exist without the former (13)), it is fascinating that Carr acknowledges the net as advantageous in offering "immediate access" to information. Is it really immediate? I mean this, in the sense that does information accessed through the internet come more intimately, is it more direct? If it is, one could gain the idea that what car is really bemoaning in his article is a new closeness with the machine, and therefore a new perception of dependency.

Beyond the mere tethering of man and machine, Carr's article also articulates a reconstruction of himself as a body related to the pathways of information embedded in internet technology. In the quote above, Carr relates his experience to the insight of Marshall McLuhan because he feels that the consumption of information through technology must reconstruct the human element receiving this information. In short, one can see in Carr's article the fear of technology as other, and a deep concern that his sense of self (perceived as a idealistic whole) is being reshaped by his use of technology towards an end that he cannot control.

In this last consideration of Carr's fear and anxiety about his relationship to the internet, it is worth considering the mechanism of reading that Carr uses to show how he has been "changed" by the machine.

I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore.

Hayles, I would guess, would rapidly deconstruct Carr's idealization of reading as a particularly rich signifier of the Western Intellectual tradition. That book culture, itself not a naturalized human activity, is taken by Carr as a standard for his ideal consciousness, one that is attuned to literature. How fascinating it is that Carr would naturalize that fluency. One might just as well say that relating to the book compromises a "natural" human consciousness, as the internet today. In fact, it seems egregious that Carr simply skate over the idea that the book could be considered a technology of itself, serving like the internet, to provide a mediation of information that must restructure the human subject. In fact, to reasses Hayles' consideration of the posthuman, why is it that we must wait for cybernetics to escape bodily understandings of intelligence. Would not the book also be a point of departure for the human intelligence from the body? What about the origins of language?

In Saturday's New York Times, writer Damon Darlin responded to Nicholas Carr's article by writing in his title "Technology Doesn't Dumb Us Down. It Frees Our Minds." A sharp contrast indeed. Consciously not as long as Carr's article, Darlin writes with a style of writing that must be considered as technologically-influenced brevity. As if making fun of Carr's long article about not being able to read long articles, Darlin writes a 140-character twitter translation of Carr's argument.

Google makes deep reading impossible. Media changes. Our brains’ wiring changes too. Computers think for us, flattening our intelligence.

"Computers think[ing] for us" is one of the central questions of How We Became Posthuman, but shelf the issue of can and how for a moment, it may be more interesting to complicate the issue of computer agency human thinking by asking "is being thinking? (in reconsideration of Descartes Cogito) and what will it mean when we computers are "being" for us? If there's an us in that construction.