THE EMBODIED COMPUTER/USER

-Like most computer users, we have experienced impatience, anger, panic, anxiety and frustration when computers do not do what you want it to, or break down.


-There seems almost a seamless transition of thought to word on the screen. These personal reflections raise the issues of the emotional and embodied relationship that computer users have with their persoanl computers.


-The relationship we have with Pcs has characteristics that sets it apart from the many other technologieswe use.


-Our love affair with computers, computer graphics and the computer networks runs deeper than aesthetic fascination and deeper than the play of the senses.


-There is for many people, a bluring of the boundaries between thee embodied self and the PC.


-Its argued that popular technical representations of computer viruses draw on discourses that assume that computers themselves are humanoid and embodied.


-The attractions of the internet, including its accessibility, are also a source of problems around security and the activities of computer 'hackers' and 'cyber-criminals'.


-A certral utopian discourse around computer technology is the potential offered by computers for humans to escape the body. For couch potatoes, video game addicts and surrogate travellers of cybersapce alike, an organic body just gets in the way. The dreamof cyberculture is to leave the 'meat' behind and to become distilled in a clean, pure uncontaminated relationship with computer technology. The human as computer' metaphor is frequently drawn upon in this attempt to deny the irrationality of embodiment.


-The idealized virtual body does not eat, drink, urinate or defecate; it does not get tired it does not become ill; it does not die. The cyborg has benn represented as the closet to this ideal human. There is a point at which the humanity of the cyborg must make itself felt; there are limits to the utopian vision of the cyborg. While an individual may successfully pretend to be different gender or age on the internet, she or he will always have to return to the embodied reality of the empty stomach.


-A futher challenge to the utopian vision of the disembodied computer user is the mythology of the bodies that are obsessed with using PC technology: computers 'hackers' and computer nerds


-The bodies of computer 'hackers' and nerds, thus are not transcended through their owners pursuits. On the contrary their bodies are inscribed upon and constructed through the computers they use.


-While computer culture often seeks to deny the human body, the ways in which computer technology is marketed and represented frequently drwas an analogy between the computer and the human body.



-Computers, as represented in advertising, are prone to many life experiences that humans experience.



-In personifying the machine as a unit of organized labour, sharing fraternal interests and union loyalties with other machines, the notice assumes a degree of evolved self-consciousness on the machoines part. Computers are often similarly represented as emotional entities.



-The ascribing of emotions to PCs is a discursive move that emphasizes their humanoid nature

-Advertisements also attempt to portray one's PC as an extension of the human body.



The Frightening Computer

-The overt reasons for portraying computers as human is to reduce the anxieties of computerphobia that many people particularly adults experience



-Most people have not the faintest idea what lies inside the hard plastic shell of their PC



-The user-computer relationship is therefore characterized not only by pleasure and a sense of harmonic bluring of the boundaries between human and machine, but is also inspires strong feelings of anxiety, importence, frustration and fear.

-The apparent growing reliance of humans upon computers has incited concern, as have developments in technology that threaten to leave people behind or to render them unemployed.

-The Mactintosh computer company was the first to develop 'user-friendly' icons in lieu of textual commands. The implications of this design strategy was that many potential computer users were alienated by the technological demands of computers requiring text commands, and thus required PCs to be 'humanized' to feel comfortble with thge technology. Microsoft, for example, has developed a program it has called 'Bob' to challenge technophobic inclinations.

-Drawing upon a nostalgia for a less complicated world, a world in which people were friendly to one another, families stayed together and the most complicated technology they owned was the family motor car. 'Bob' as a humanoid character, speaks their language and relates to them as would a friend.

Risky Computing
-Personal computers constitute sites that are redolent with cultural anxieties around the nature of humanity and the self. To deal with this uncertainty and the time-space distanciationand globalizing tendencies of late modernity, trust has become central to human interactions.

-The euphoria around the 'information superhighway' with its utopian visions of computer users able to access each other globally and 'get' connected has been somewhat diminished of late by a series of scares around the security problems threatened by the very accessible nature of the internet.

-News reports of hacker crimes typically emphasize the growing security risks caused by the increasing use of the internet. The hackers have managed to 'impersonate a computer that is "trusted"by the computer targeted for attack'

-Futher concern has also recently been generated about the links that children may make with the outside world via the internet, particularly in relation to contact with paedophiles, pornography and sexual exchanges over email or chat networks.

-The home is now longer a place of safety and refuge for children, the computer no longer simply an educational tool or source of entertainment but is the possible site childrens's corruption.
Ww invest a great deal of trust in computer technology, espicially in our PC. Many of us have little knowledge about how they wok, relying on experts to produce and set up the technology and to our aid when something goes wrong.

-They take pride of place in our studies at home and our children's bedrooms. The ways in which we depict computers as humanoid, having emotions and embodiment, is evidence of this intimacy.

-The relationship between users and PCs is similar to that between lovers or close friends. An intimate relationship with others involves ambivalence: fear as well as pleasure. Just as they described as friends or spouses in the masculinist culture of computing, computers are also frequently descrbed in feminine sexual or materal roles.

-Computer users are both attracted towards the promises of cyberspace in the utopian freedom from the flesh. But are also threatened by its potential to engulf the self and expose one's vulnerability to the penetration of enemy others.