The terms nature and naturalness come into play within the various texts. For Bolter and Grusin, this is particularly felt when they discuss hypermediacy, where the medium is set up as opposed to naturalness, and realistic representation is "stretched or ruptured" (Bolter and Grusin 34). Emphasizing this as associated with the unnatural, they write, "if software designers now characterize the two-dimensional desktop interface as unnatural, they really mean that it is too obviously mediated" (33). Throughout Bolter and Grusin's text, nature comes up as something in opposition to the world of technology. An example of this is when they describe awareness of the photographic medium as discrediting "the notion that the photograph is drawn by the 'pencil of nature" (38), which had been suggested by Talbot.
Bolter and Grusin highlight a seeming parallel between the realist and natural, in opposition to the fictive and technological. While this is a generalization and my precise words might be better chosen, I believe that it does point to an experience of the technological as seemingly separate from 'real' life that is equated with elements that exist outside of the industrial and later technological worlds – things that can be enclosed within a medium, as pure, untouched content. Near the end of their discussion, there is a quote I found interesting by Erkki Huhtamo that states that "technology is gradually becoming a second nature [...] there is no need to make it transparent any longer, simply because it is not felt to be in contradiction to the 'authenticity' of the experience'" (42). I believe Huhtamo, in this quote, is expressing something that is on the perceptual level but also deeply applicable to the conceptual one as well.
For Sandy Stone, "social spaces are beginning to appear that are simultaneously natural, artificial, constituted by inscription. The boundaries between the social and the natural and between biology and technology are beginning to take on the generous permeability that characterizes communal space" (Stone page 9 of the pdf). It was this commentary by Stone that initially drew me to the topic and made me reflect on what changes would occur if we were indeed to perceive instead of a disconnect between nature and technology a mutual existence. Citing François Dagognet, Stone describes that the nature and technology disconnect provides a "false dichotomy." Building on Dagognet's argument that "the category 'nature' has not existed for thousands of years," Stone posits that "the category 'nature,' rather than referring to any object or category in the world, is a strategy for maintaining boundaries for political and economic ends, and thus a way of making meaning" (Stone page 13 of the pdf).
Contemplating the implications of viewing the natural world – defined as devoid of human influence – as abolished long ago generates less the conclusion that the world has less value than an awareness of the permeability of the space between these two seemingly discrete worlds. There is no pure nature out there that can be returned to or nurtured as a retreat, as an acceptance of technology as nature – defined by what we ascribe the term to rather than the devoid entirely of human impact definition – asserts. Environmentally, this approach has the implication that we cannot expect to both evolve and consume (which, with technology, seems unified) without it being part of the entire network. Technology may be another wonder of nature produced by the human species. Still, much as termite mounds, it leaves debris that exists in the same tangible space and hence of the same matter as anything else in nature, inviting a different perspective on technology through the unintuitive association of it with the 'natural.'
I really appreciated your blog post, and it made me think about how often we use the phrase “the real world” to denote spaces that are ostensibly not mediated by digital technology. Very often this is formulated as a sort of opposition, i.e., “Twitter is not the real world.” On the one hand, I acknowledge that what people often mean when they say this is that Twitter – and social media in general – is not nearly as totalizing or all-encompassing as it presents itself to be. The latest topic trending on social media may be completely unknown to the vast majority of the planet’s residents. On the other hand, I balk at the implications of this statement, which is to say its insinuation that social media is somehow not a product of “nature” and exists in a separate, “unnatural” sphere. At a basic level, the infrastructure required to facilitate social media is all derived from “nature” (indeed, often in ways that are deeply harmful, such as the mining of the materials necessary to construct computers, phones, etc.) And, at a more abstract level, the notion that technology is somehow separate from “nature” or “reality” implies that our affective experiences in the digital realm can be neatly cordoned off from our affective experiences in the so-called “real world.” All of this brings me back to the quote from Heather Davis and Zoe Todd that I mentioned in my blog post: “[We] need to acknowledge our embedded and embodied relations with our other-than-human kin and the land itself” (776). Perhaps we also need to acknowledge our embedded and embodied relations with technology. Perhaps such relationality would allow us to achieve the “different perspective on technology through the unintuitive association of it with the ‘natural’” that you call for. On a final note, I wonder how the notion of relationality – and, more broadly speaking, an attempt to move beyond a technology/nature binary – might shape our thinking about AI in Week 7. What would it mean for us to extend relationality to AI?
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