Following my first film review on A New Hope, here is a second shorter post on The Cyborg, after being inspired to pick up on a theme from Matthew Taylor’s review of the same film (fearing technology):
The Cyborg includes many aspects relevant to the themes we have been exploring, however one theme in particular struck me on rewatching it this week after a Twitter exchange: how/should we think about agency with regards to technology (for example, around the issues of fear and control, if we should even consider things in this way)?
Great questions! 🤔 Thinking about AI and agency brings to mind this from Hayles (1999: 288): ‘In the posthuman view…conscious agency has never been “in control”…distributed cognition replaces autonomous will…’ #mscedc (1/2)
— Michael Wolfindale (@mwolfindale) January 23, 2020
The Cyborg portrays the ‘human’ exerting power over the ‘cyborg’ (the ‘human’ choosing its name and date of birth, as if it were a ‘tool’ without agency). This brings to mind the way technology is often seen as a ‘tool’ in education, rather than technology and education being ‘co-constitutive of each other, entangled in cultural, material, political and economic assemblages of great complexity’ (Bayne 2015: 18).
How, then, might we consider agency in this complex entanglement? Hayles (1999: 288) argues that ‘in the posthuman view…conscious agency has never been “in control”…distributed cognition replaces autonomous will’ and, in this talk and book, discusses the idea of the ‘cognitive nonconscious’.
I plan to dig further into how we might consider consciousness, cognition and agency with regards to technology and education as we continue with the course.
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