bodies

This page points to writing about bodies, identity, communication and robots in digital environments.

It covers -

• introduction
• corporeality and communication - virtuality, disembodiment and computer-mediated communication
• addiction, confession and confusion - claims about 'net addiction', 'cyber dependency', cyberchondria and other disorders
• the body as data
• commoditisation - organ trading and other issues
• cyborgs and the posthuman - extropians, posthumans and transhumans
• rapture of the nerds - migrating your consciousness to the net?
• the grim reaper - medical technology, quality of life, cryonics and other questions
• the perfectible body - questions about cosmetic surgery, body modification and genetic choice in the digital environment

     introduction

As preceding pages of this guide note, technologies and markets in the digital environment have been characterised as involving new

• visions of the body, ranging from digital CAT scans and biometrics to claims that we can defeat (or merely indefinitely defer) death
• disembodiments of social relations, including chat rooms and dating services
• opportunities for making money, whether through identifying and treating psychological disorders or through trading body parts

Much of that characterisation is problematic, given the evolutionary nature of most technology and its social context. Few aspects of the internet are truly revolutionary, with concerns about virtuality, mutability or telepresence for example being a feature of past 'new media'.

     corporeality and communication

That heading is, we hope, our last genuflection to the arid end of the sociology of the web, so if you have got this far don't despair.

A famous New Yorker cartoon explains that 'on the web no one knows that you're a dog', although in practice it either does not matter or you can suss out the essential characteristics of who is on the other end of the network. My Tiny Life: Crime & Passion In A Virtual World (London: 4th Estate 1999) by Julian Dibbell is a somewhat self-indulgent account of name calling and role playing among the MUD and MOO aficionados.

We were tempted to suggest that the participants turned off their machines, spurned the double decaf soy macchiato and got a life - or merely stopped reading Catherine MacKinnon - but part of the charm of the net is its opportunities for cultural diversity. Laura Gurak's Privacy & Persuasion in Cyberspace (New Haven: Yale Uni Press 1997) offers another perspective on that world and also reproduces the cartoon.

We have noted Patricia Wallace's The Psychology of the Internet (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 1999) and Connections (Cambridge: MIT Press 1992) by Lee Sproull & Sara Kiesler. The essays in Intermedia: Interpersonal Communication in a Media World (New York: Oxford Uni Press 1986) edited by Gary Gumpert & Robert Cathcart are also of interest.

Network & Netplay: Virtual Groups On The Internet (Cambridge: MIT Press 1998) is a valuable collection of essays edited by Fay Sudweeks. Lynn Cherny's Conversation & Community: Chat in A Virtual World (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 1999) is a major sociological study. Rob Shields edited Cultures of Internet: Virtual Spaces, Real Histories, Living Bodies (London: SAGE 1996), more postgrad seminar fodder.

CTheory, an online journal edited by Arthur Kroker, will beam you up to the high end of postmodern communication theory. Remember to take your own oxygen supply before you go: the air up there is thin and stuffy on occasion.

Jayne Gackenbach edited the comprehensive Psychology & the Internet: Intrapersonal, Interpersonal & Transpersonal Implications (San Diego: Academic Press 1999), a major primer for behavioural scientists. No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behaviour (Oxford: Oxford Uni Press 1986) by Joshua Meyrowitz is a more general study.

     addiction, confession and confusion

Therapists, the media and consumers discovered what has variously been characterised as internet addiction (IA), pathological internet use (PIU), cyberaddiction, 'cyberwidows' and 'cybersexual addition' or 'web dependency' during the late 1990s.

Although there is little agreement about the shape or basis of the addiction it has thrived what appears to be a thriving therapy industry that has spread from the US to other countries. Therapists and journalists have offered lurid depictions of

dozens of lives that were shattered by an overwhelming compulsion to surf the Net, play MUD games, or chat with distant and invisible neighbors in the timeless limbo of Cyberspace

and of the 'internet junkie' who

betrays the tell-tale signs of his addiction: his skin is pallid and covered in spots, he sits nervously hunched, peering to correct his blighted vision and he has trouble communicating with friends and family.

At just 16 he is emotionally fragile, physically ill and his future has been compromised by the addiction which has him in its grip. But when the lights are switched off he gets online, he could not care less about the problems it brings. His drug is the Internet ...

The label has proved useful in justifying early release from military conscription in Finland, restrictions on cybercafes in China

In a detailed note elsewhere on this site we suggest that most studies of cyberaddiction are deeply problematical because they

• draw on small (sometimes ludicrously small) and often self-selected populations,
• have no independent oversight
• are based on problematical data collection mechanisms (eg leading questions and poorly structured survey)
• involve serious uncertainties about the interpretation of figures and answers.

The seriousness and prevalence of 'net addiction' is unclear. Its uniqueness is also uncertain, given the long - and in retrospect often amusing - history of claims for addiction to new media or media-related disorders. They include religious and medical jeremiads about addiction to television and to the telephone addiction, explored in that note.

Perhaps more positively, the net has spawned confession sites such as Dailyconfession.com ("the only place in the world that you can go to truly confess your sin (or sins), your transgressions, your humanity, in complete anonymity") and Grouphug ("the idea is for anyone to anonymously confess to anything. it actually feels kind of good to know that someone will read it").

Why unload on your local pastor, when you are too lazy to blog and can publish gems such as

I do not love my boyfriend, I care, but I dont love him. He is so dependent, I've been trying to dump him for a month, but he's just starting his new job, his b-day is next saturday and i planned a surprise party....

Besides that... I met someone else, he is not the reason for dumping my boyfriend, but well i sure like him a LOT...

and

I wasted 100 bucks on games including doom 3 and half-life and I hardly play. Now I'm saving 500 for and Xbox and a PS2 and some games to go along with it. I doubt I'll ever play them

A poster to PostSecret characterised confessions on that site as -

Each is a silent prayer of hope, love, fear, joy, pain, sorrow, guilt, happiness, hatred, confidence, strength, weakness and a million other things that we all share as human beings... there is no fakeness here

It is unclear whether supposed web addiction is associated with the 'computer rage' profiled by Kent Norman or the 'computer anxiety' highlighted earlier in this guide. Does it result in cybersuicide and exacerbate cyberchondria?

Christopher Bates, commended by one of the gurus, suggests that 'cyberaddiction' is caused by "low blood volume", presumably an advance on past explanations such as witches on broomsticks.

     the body as data

Notions of the body as data have taken three forms -

• CAT and other mapping technologies - looking beyond the visible body in an extension of more traditional x-ray and eeg pictures
• biometrics - leveraging fingerprints, retina patterns or DNA as unique signatures
• data as destiny - with claims that genetic information is an accurate predictor of behaviour or health

The third form has been reflected in questions about the privacy of medical records, insurance and liability policies, and family planning. It is also evident in debate about data ownership. Do you own your genetic code? Can a researcher commoditise code from your body, eg patent cells extracted during cancer treatment?

Questions of anonymity, identity and representation are explored in the privacy, censorship, politics and security guides on this site.

     commoditisation

The past 40 years have seen a revolution in how we conceptualise the body, driven by the harvesting of tissue and the blurring of traditional boundaries about bodily integrity and commoditisation.

Until last century most commoditisation of bodies was concerned with labour, whether through slavery (buying, selling and using the 'human motor'), as employees in free markets or as indentured workers. Collection and trade in body parts was largely confined to teeth - recycled for dentures - and hair (useful for wigs, stuffing matresses or pillows, and even some textiles).

Recent technologies have involved an expansion of the trade in full/part blood, extending to kidneys, corneas, hearts, livers, meninges and other parts for scientific research or for reuse in a human recipient. Those parts are sourced from live/dead donors, sold by the indigent, taken from executed criminals or even stolen from bodies awaiting autopsy.

Legislation such as the UK Human Tissue Act 1990 and Transplantation of Human Organs Act 1993 (reflected in restrictions at eBay and other fora) appears to have driven the commercial body trade offshore from major Western countries rather than eliminated it. That is unsurprising, given reports that selling organs from live patients may bring US$4,500 for a cornea or US$25,000 for a kidney and that a 'pre-loved' spine may fetch US$3,500.

Point of entry into the literature on markets, ethics and technologies are Stephen Wilkinson's Bodies for Sale: Ethics & Exploitation in the Human Body Trade (London: Routledge 2003), Body Shopping: The Economy Fuelled by Flesh and Blood (Oxford: One World 2008) by Donna Dickenson, the 1998 Human Tissue Transplantation Crime (PDF) by Elizabeth King & Russell Smith of the Australian Institute of Criminology, Nancy Scheper-Hughes' 2000 Global Traffic in Human Organs lecture, Organ transplantation: Meanings & Realities (Madison: Uni of Wisconsin Press 1996) edited by Stuart Younger, Renée Fox & Laurence O'Connell, Kidney for Sale by Owner: Human Organs, Transplantation and the Market (Washington: Georgetown Uni Press 2005) by Mark Cherry, Body Parts: Property Rights and the Ownership of Human Biological Materials (Washington: Georgetown Uni Press 1996) by E Richard Gold, Property in the Human Body & its Parts: Reflections on Self-Determination in Liberal Society (Florence: European University Institute 2001) by Alexandra George and Black Markets: The Supply and Demand of Body Parts (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 2006) by Michelle Goodwin.

     cyborgs and the posthuman

Having shed gender or identity as a Gutenberg artefact, why not get rid of your body?

Katherine Hayles' How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature & Informatics (Chicago: Uni of Chicago Press 1999) explores

theoretical hypotheses about the total transformation of the human body that occurs through its interpolation in the nascent information networks. At successive moments in their development, digital media have contributed to the destabilization of an established sense of "reality." But, at the same time, these new media are used to simulate signifying objects, the bodies and the worlds they are rendering obsolete ... an epistemic shift toward pattern/randomness from presence/absence. This shift affects human and textual bodies on two levels at once, as a change in the body (the material substrate) and as a change in the message (the codes of representation).

Much of Donna Haraway's cyberfeminist Simians, Cyborgs & Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Routledge 1991) and Chris Gray's Cyborg Citizen: Politics in the Posthuman Age (London: Routledge 2001), Ramez Naam's More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement (New York: Broadway 2005), Love and Sex with Robots (New York: Harper 2007) by David Levy and The Cyborg Experiments: The Extensions of the Body in the Media Age (London: Continuum 2001) edited by Joanna Zylinska strike us as merely silly. There are pointers to similar studies on the site of the US Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies (RCCS).

There is more bite in Claudia Springer's Electronic Eros, Bodies & Desire in the Postindustrial Age (Austin: Uni of Texas Press 1996), Enhancing Evolution: The Ethical Case for Making Better People (Princeton: Princeton Uni Press 2007) by John Harris and Digital People: From Bionic Humans to Androids (Washington: National Academies Press 2004) by Sidney Perkowitz, also available online.

The Cyborg Handbook (London: Routledge 1996) is a weighty collection of theorizing and fiction edited by Chris Gray, Heidi Figueroa-Sarriera & Steven Mentor. Just the thing to read while you wait at the cryogenics facility after pondering Gray's 1997 paper on The Ethics and Politics of Cyborg Embodiment: Citizenship as a Hypervalue ... or Stelarc: The Monograph (Cambridge: MIT Press 2005) edited by Marquard Smith, a work that for us echoes fin-de-siecle fascination with Le Petomane.

The ontological instability of cyborgs warrants the use of political technologies such as manifestos and written constitutions in order to ameliorate the potential of cyborgization to fatally undermine political self-determination and the very idea of citizenship.

Information Please: Culture and Politics in the Age of Digital Machines (Durham: Duke Uni Press 2006) by Mark Poster is more modest.

     rapture of the nerds

If you are interested in "Posthumanism in the Age of Pancapitalism" - the cyborg and downloaded virtual consciousness - you can explore the Extropy Institute, replete with statements such as

Humanity is a temporary stage along the evolutionary pathway. We are not the zenith of nature's development. It is time for us to consciously take charge of ourselves and to accelerate our transhuman progress. No more gods, no more faith, no more timid holding back. Let us blast out of our old forms, our ignorance, our weakness, and our mortality. The future belongs to posthumanity.

World Transhumanist Association founder David Pearce's The Hedonistic Imperative more modestly claimed that

genetic engineering and nanotechnology will abolish suffering in all sentient life. The abolitionist project is hugely ambitious but technically feasible.

Transhumanism offers

sights more majestically beautiful, music more deeply soul-stirring, sex more exquisitely erotic, mystical epiphanies more awe-inspiring, and love more profoundly intense than anything we can now properly comprehend.

A less reverent response to posthumanism and transhumanism is evident in a Wilson Quarterly article that somewhat cruelly characterised transhumanists as

a lot of young, pasty, lanky, awkward ... white males talking futuristic bullshit, terribly worried that we will take their toys away.

Others have dismissed visions of uploading consciousness to cyberspace as "rapture of the nerds". UK philosopher Nicj Bostrom more provocatively asked whether we are already living (if living is the word) in a computer simulation, commenting "My gut feeling, and it's nothing more than that, is that there's a 20 percent chance we're living in a computer simulation".

A 2001 response by Robin Hanson, useful for people who fret that the designer of the Matrix will decided that for them it is 'game over', was to try to be as interesting as possible.

Fans of Derrida - love that "carno-phallogocentrism" - may enjoy Cary Wolfe's Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory (Chicago: Uni of Chicago Press 2003). A slightly less reverent view appears in Ed Regis's Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition (Reading: Addison-Wesley 1990).

Our short note on the history of the robot in popular culture, with key landmarks and critical studies, is here.

     the grim reaper

One rationale for post/transhumanism (apart from those claims of "mystical epiphanies more awe-inspiring ... love more profoundly intense") has been the desire to defer or even omit the final meeting with the grim reaper.

Historians and medical specialists have been underwhelmed by hype during the past century about miracle diets, implanted goat gonads, vasectomy, coffee enemas, immortality through nanotechnology or cryonics. In recent years we have not seen lifestyle changes, pharmaceuticals, surgical procedures or genetic re-engineering developments that would justify claims that the average life expectancy in advanced economies is far below the biological 'ceiling' and that the next generation can expect to reach an age of 150 or 225 years.

Ray Kurzweil's Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever (New York: Rodale 2004) forsees infinite life spans, achievable within twenty or so years through innovations such as millions of nanobots repairing bones, muscles, arteries and even brain cells, along with improvements to our genetic coding downloaded via the net. Unfortunately, since at least the 1880s there have been recurrent forecasts that immortality is just twenty years away (so treat your body well until the technology rides to the rescue) ... people are still waiting.

In the US life expectancy at birth rose by 21 years during 1900 to 1950 (from 47 to 68 years), climbing another nine years from 1950 to 2002 (up to 77 years). In 2004 the federal government forecast a six year extension of the lifespan by 2075, questioning "the capacity to repeat the gains in life expectancy that were achieved in the 20th century." Many of those gains were attributable to improved nutrition, reduced workplace accident rates and factors such as readier access to potable water and soap.

Concentration on the date for checking out from the Darwin Hotel has tended to obscure more serious questioning about the quality of life - gaining an extra seven years of bedsores and incontinence pads may not be so desirable, particularly if you are still stuck with Seinfeld reruns - and the economic or social impact of extended longevity. Some states, such as Japan, are now below the replacement rate and face problems as the workforce shrinks. Concern about the cost of a rapidly aging population is leading Chinese policymakers to question maintenance of the current one-child policy.

Some enthusiasts have decided that deferral is the answer. The Cryonics Institute thus proclaims that

When and if future medical technology allows, our member patients hope to be healed and revived, and awaken to extended life in youthful good health

In practice they are parking bits of wetware - typically the head - in a freezer, in the hope that future technologies will somehow solve hitherto insuperable problems with freezing and subsequent defrosting.

Practice post-mortem has not been subject of a digital revolution: most people are cremated or buried, despite forecasts in works such as Soylent Green that they would be eaten by humans rather than microorganisms and the fabled worms.

The only 'innovations' have been -

• loading the dear departed's ashes into a rocket that is then launched skywards, supposedly joining the stars in emulation of Timothy Leary and Gene Roddenberry
• video gravestones - with a monitor that displays pre-recorded messages for grieving families or allows them to express outrage when a court rejects a video will.

One promoter suggested that the gravestones might feature an internet connection and - shades of Waugh's The Loved One - they might be coin-operated or swiped with a credit card, with cemetery operators charging fees to rent headsets.

Concerns about cybersuicide are discussed in a supplementary note.

     the perfectible body

Body modification - through cicatrisation, circumcision, footbinding, infibulation and tattooing - is as old as civilisation. What is new about the digital environment is

• ready access in advanced economies to implanted prostheses, including artificial joints and pacemakers
• access to and - as significantly - acceptance of aesthetic surgery
• cross-cultural adoption of physical ideals that extend beyond traditional use of clothing, cosmetics and hair styling to cosmetic surgery
• aspirations to achieve the 'perfect body' through diet, exercise and surgery or - alas - through eugenics

Sander Gilman thus commented that

By the year 2020, no one will ask you whether you've had aesthetic surgery, they will ask you why you didn't have aesthetic surgery. Today it's acceptable to live in a world where you can change your looks but choose not to. But in 20 years or so in certain societies - Brazil, Argentina, more and more the UK, South Korea, Japan - the question will be 'Why didn't you take advantage? Why are you walking around bald?'

Blog guru Richard Scoble went emo about "human augmentation" in 2008, asking

why couldn't I have a little glass behind my eye that tells me your Facebook page and tells me a little bit about you on Wikipedia while I am looking at you?

I would imagine in 15 years we are going to have something like that; some sort of visualisation lens or some way to jack into your optic nerve to put imagery on what you are actually seeing and augment your human experience.

But that might be 30 years away... I don't want to sign up for the beta test of that one in case they get it wrong.

In 30 years time we won't have flying cars or proton pills or the other geek fetishes highlighted here.

For background see in particular Virginia Blum's Flesh Wounds: The Culture of Cosmetic Surgery (Berkely: Uni of California Press 2003), Sander Gilman's Making the Body Beautiful: A Cultural History of Aesthetic Surgery (Princeton: Princeton Uni Press 1999) and Creating Beauty to Cure the Soul: Race and Psychology in the Shaping of Aesthetic Surgery (Durham: Duke Uni Press 1998), Elizabeth Haiken's Venus Envy: A History of Cosmetic Surgery (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni Press 1997) and Cosmetic Surgery, Gender and Culture (New York: Palgrave 2003) by Suzanne Fraser.

Questions about gender and autonomy are explored in Debra Gimlin's Body Work: Beauty and Self-Image in American Culture (Berkeley: Uni of California Press 2002), Susan Bordo's Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (Berkeley: Uni of California Press 2004), Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth; How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women (1991), Kathy Davis' Dubious Equalities and Embodied Differences: Cultural Studies on Cosmetic Surgery (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield 2003) and Kenneth Dutton's The Perfectible Body: The Western Ideal of Physical Development (London: Cassell 1995). An upbeat view of biotech appears in Pete Shanks' Human Genetic Engineering: A Guide for Activists, Skeptics, and the Very Perplexed (New York: Nation 2005).

John Passmore's classic The Perfectibility of Man (London: Duckworth 1970) offers a more sobering view of the history of aspirations and expectations.

Among the vast literature on genetic engineering see John Harris' Enhancing Evolution: The Ethical Case for Making Better People (Princeton: Princeton Uni Press 2007), Babies by Design: The Ethics of Genetic Choice (New Haven: Yale Uni Press 2007) by Ronald Green, Stem Cell Century: Law and Policy for a Breakthrough Technology (New Haven: Yale Uni Press 2007) by Russell Korobkin & Stephen Munzer and Fundamentals of the Stem Cell Debate: The Scientific, Religious, Ethical and Political Issues (Berkeley: Uni of California Press 2007) edited by Kristen Renwick Monroe, Ronald Miller & Jerome Tobis.

The Australian Law Reform Commission's 2003 Essentially Yours: The Protection of Human Genetic Information report, OECD report on the Creation & Governance of Human Genetic Research Databases (PDF) and Graeme Laurie's Genetic Privacy: A Challenge to Medico-legal Norms (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 2002) are also of particular value.

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