In this reading, I’m going to be looking at both Mark Poster’s “Postmodern Virtualities” as well as two chapters from Pierre Levy’s Becoming Virtual: Reality in the Digital Age. I will indicate their respective passages, but will also intertwine them in my notes, as they comment well on one another. Poster: The discussion of postmodern…
In Mark Hansen’s Bodies in Code, all reality is “mixed reality,” which assumes that just as the body is still the primary access to the “real” world, it is also used to access the virtual. The role of the body, argues Hansen, is based in the sensation, ability and perception of tactility and visual perception. According to…
In the introduction to Cary Wolfe’s What is Posthumanism?, his objective is to find ways to push human analysis beyond its inherent anthropocentrism. In this book, Wolfe engages the ongoing discussion of the transformation of the human, and it is through this introductory chapter that he attempts to unravel the problem of humanism, which he…
In “Prometheus as Performer: Toward a Posthumanist Culture?” Ihab Hassan uses the metaphor of the mythological Prometheus to frame his discussion on posthumanism and positions him as a trickster with a double nature that he wishes to reconcile. Hassan’s overarching argument about posthumanism is that it must be viewed as the representation of the convergence…
About two months ago, I finally finished The Walking Dead game, all 5 episodes. Rather than posting a review for the remaining 3 chapters (as I did with 1 and 2), I’d rather give an overview of what I learned and what I plan on doing with the research I did while playing. I know…
This is a proposal for a larger body of work focusing on authorship and identity in cyberspace. I’m trying to look into the re-appropriation of programs, software, and tools that are turning Internet users into producers of various types of media. I’m interested in what happens when people start to use programs made available to…
Oh McSweeney’s, you’ve done it again. Gamify Your Life with EveryThing This part cracked me up: Or you can just buy points! Money really helps you get ahead in EveryThing! Fame, too, is a major source of points—and the higher you rise on our global LifescoreBoard, climbing over people less worthy than you from all over the world,…
At this point, I’ve finished episode 1 of The Walking Dead and am now nearly done episode 2. Episode 1 ended much sooner than I was expecting, and I had to make some *big decisions* about who to save – Doug, the geeky oversharer, or Carly, the testy, entitled journalist who knows my (Lee’s) “big secret.”…
If I could summarize this game into a few words they would be: Awesome, Hard, Complicated, Boring. Also, Forever as in it takes forever. Embarrassingly (and yes, this is embarrassing because of how much I’ve loved the FF franchise for years), I’ve been playing the same game of FFXII for the last 4 years. This is…
I’m almost done the first episode of this game series, and let me just say that it’s the closest I’ve ever come to having control over what my character is actually saying/doing. I won’t go into the mechanics of the entire game, but with reference to the narrative and dialogue, your character, Lee Everett, is…
The Simulation Space 