The Roots of our Cyborg Selves (Selfe & Selfe)

It’s fitting that our last reading takes us farther back than any others. Selfe and Selfe’s essay was published in 1996, around when I started using the internet. The authors comb through the chattering on listservs, a medium that is quaint and outdated to us, to draw conclusions about computer use that resonate nearly 20 years later. They look back through history, from the public forums of ancient Athens, through the salons of Enlightenment Europe, and find that even when a new public sphere opens up to exchange ideas, it is still constrained by the dominant ideologies of its culture (338-9).

The authors repeatedly drive home the point that computer networks are firmly rooted in military research, and are “war machines” (343-4). The opening up of these networks to civilian use is, they say, a way for states to push their populations toward spaces that allow new and free expressions of ideas, but are also regulated. In this sense, computer networks are still fundamentally shaped by their roots in war, and broader state control, such as “computerized records of citizen criminals, computerized lists of welfare recipients, computer-supported census records” (342). I immediately think of contemporary revelations of government cyber-spying on its own citizens and across the globe. I imagine these aren’t revelations at all to Selfe and Selfe; such use was implicit from the birth of computer networks.

But the authors point out that, while powerful state and corporate interests may still have zones of power in computer networks, there are also zones of impotence (348). While these networks were designed for control, there are way to subvert them. Selfe and Selfe refer to such actions as “tactics,” which are “small and—at some levels, partially invisible—ways of ‘making do’ within an oppressive system that reproduces its own power constantly and in extended ways” (349). They give the example of technical writers (who were probably among the earliest regular internet users who couldn’t program) going outside of their employers’ restrictions to seek digital information and connect with others who shared their professional and personal interests. This still happens today, though it’s not exactly revolutionary to turn to the web to quench curiosity. I think of contemporary “hacktivists” such as Anonymous as the current practitioners of tactics. Their use of computer networks to strike at businesses and governments they disagree with are conscious displays of subverting what they consider an oppressive system.

The authors ponder whether the novel approaches to computer use in the 90s are paving a road to humanity becoming “cyborgs.” I don’t think they use that word in a literal sense (although technologies to make that so aren’t far off), but rather in the sense that we treat our machines as extensions of ourselves. We are “makers of the machine, and this activity has made us partially machine ourselves” (352). As we’ve discussed several times this semester, our digital literacy doesn’t just add to our lives; it fundamentally changes how we live. The authors think that our cyborg-selves are able to break down barriers. We can “recode, rewrite, reconstitute not only the text of their own bodies, but also the larger cultural/economic/ideological narratives and mythologies of the male-dominated war State, the cultural body politic” (353). This strikes me as more triumphalist than reality has proven. While our ever-present machines have given us new and strange abilities, old barriers remain, and new barriers may still be raised.

Selfe, Cynthia L., and Richard J. Selfe. “Writing as Democratic Social Action in a Technological World: Politicizing and Inhabiting Virtual Landscapes.” Nonacademic Writing: Social Theory and Technology. Eds. Ann Hill Duin, and Craig J. Hansen. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1996. 325-358.