(Note the following is a fragment of a first draft of my dissertation work, posted here for feedback by friends and fellow scholars. Everything here could and probably will change by the time the work is done.)
Introduction: Cyborg Sunrise
If Conrad’s pithy summary of the well-bounded condition of modern personhood, “we live as we dream, alone” was ever true, it is laughable now. We may dream alone, but we awake into networks. The morning ritual of this particular 21st century subject goes like this. I an awakened by my alarm-clock radio playing programming produced by National Public Radio. I proceed to the kitchen. I peel the blue plastic lid off of a metal cylinder of Columbian-grown coffee, marketed under the charmingly folksy “Maxwell House” brand, a division of the US based Kraft corporation (formerly a division of Philip Morris). I pour the coffee into a coffee-maker bearing the Gevalia brand (also a Kraft subsidiary), and add water delivered by the local municipal water utility. I wait for coffee-maker to extract stimulant alkaloids from the coffee by means of the brewing process. While waiting, I open the lid of my laptop computer, which bears the brand of the California-based Apple company and was manufactured in a facility located in mainland China. Opening the lid wakes the computer from its own energy saving “sleep cycle.” Its operating system, derived from the much earlier BSD Unix operating system developed by computer scientists at the University of California at Berkeley, dutifully proceeds to awake various systems, the hard-drive, the display, and most importantly the wireless networking device – which connects my tiny laptop to the globe-straddling expanse of the internet by means of a international wireless networking protocol (IEEE 802.11g) that allows it to talk to a wireless basestation device (Linksys corporation model WRT-52g) that connects it to a consumer-grade broadband internet connection (hardware and bandwidth provided by Time-Warner). While the laptop shakes the sleep out of its eyes, I reach down and toggle the power switch on the home-brew desktop system I assembled myself from: a Mainboard by the Taiwanese ASUS corporation, though it might have been assembled on the mainland or perhaps the Czech republic; a CPU by the Californian AMD corporation, probably manufactured in Dresden, Germany; and a hard-drive by Seagate Technology of California, possibly manufactured in Wuxi, China. The desktop runs Ubuntu Linux, an operating system developed by a volunteer consortium of programmers drawn from the ranks of amateur enthusiasts, academics, and employees of a wide variety of governments and firms. While the desktop completes its boot cycle I return to the kitchen and pour myself a cup of Coffee, enjoying a drug habit I share with 90% of American adults. I take a sip and enjoy the subjective effects of mingling a compound probably developed by Coffea arabica as a means of pest control with my neurochemistry. For me, the experience is one of mental clarity and a general sense of well-being.
My fix in hand, I return to my machines, both of which have now readied themselves for my use. On the laptop I startup the web-browser known as Mozilla Firefox (another piece of software produced by an assemblage of volunteers, this one shepherded over by the non-profit Mozilla Foundation) and proceed to open web pages that provide me access to my e-mail account, and something known as an RSS aggregator, which is a piece of software that automatically retrives content for me from a variety of websites. Both my e-mail account and the aggregator are provided for me by the Google corporation of Mountain View, California (motto “don’t be evil”). My e-mail this morning is rather boring, a note from my mother, a notice from the Time-Warner informing me my bill is due, a list of upcoming local cultural events provided by my University (I have set the e-mail address my public University provides to me to forward messages sent to it on to my Google account) and some pleas from donations from a variety of political campaigns. My RSS reader has fetched for me a great cornucopia of articles from a list of sources too long to list here in any detail but which include major media outlets (such as: CNN, Reuters, and The New York Times), major political blogs (such as: Markos Moulitsas’ Daily Kos and Joshua Micah Marshall’s Talking Points Memo), activist blogs (such as Jessica Valenti’s Feministing), Epicurious, a recepie publishing website; Digg, a system that publishes links to web-content based on the votes of its users; more blogs run by economists, sociologists, media scholars, science-fiction authors and experts on IP law, each discussing his or her field of expertise; news from the Indymedia consortium of independent (generally leftist/anarchist affliated) news organizations; and the difficult-to-categorize BoingBoing.net, a self proclaimed “directory of wonderful things” that publishes a wide variety of geeky articles, ranging from Science-fiction short stories, to reviews of role-playing games, to discussions of copyright law, to pictures of retro-futurist cosplayers. Today I am greeted by about 400 articles. I skim through them quickly clicking on those that interest me, ignoring many more.
And these are not the only sources of information I am monitoring this morning. On my laptop I have opened a client for the micro-blogging service Twitter. This allows me to read short messages posted to the web by other Twitter users. I specifiy whose messages I want to recieve. Some of the people I am reading are friends, others are legal or political organizations working on issues I am interested in, others are authors and artists that have created work I have enjoyed. This morning on Twitter a noted Graphic novelist tells an obscene joke, a friend gripes about his un-appreciateive students, and another friend and I hold a brief debate about the relative merits of a recent political ad being run by the Democratic candidate for president. An instant messanger client also sits quietly on my desktop. Glancing at its window I see a variety of friends are online, but none I wish to chat with at this time.
And then there is the webcam browser.