King Ludd and the Resistance to Technology

Panelists:

N. Catherine Hayles (UCLA), Michael Joyce (Vassar Coll), Elizabeth Kaplan (SUNY), Douglas Kellner (Univ Texas), David Kolb (Bates Coll), Mark Poster (UC Irvine), John C. Rowe (UC Irvine), Allucquere Rosanne Stone (Univ Texas), Gregory Ulmer (Univ Florida)

Moderators:

Valerie Allen (USF), David Erben (USF)

Pre-Conference Statements

With the increasing awareness, from the late eighteenth century onwards, of the social changes brought about by industrialization, technology comes to be defined as an agency in its own right. And modern, "high" technology, with its formal mathematical rationality and mechanical laws, has extended its instrumental rationality to the human mind. Machines have invaded our personal space - filling in for organs and supplementing our minds. But have we tended to adapt to technology too uncritically? To hear some of its advocates, one would think that modern or high technology has no past. Since William Gibson introduced the term in Neuromancer in 1984, "cyberspace" has become a catch-all term for our age. This perspective, however, ignores the possibility that cyberspace is a consensual cliche, a dumping ground for repackaged philosophies about space, subjectivity, and culture, that VR is just another representation and that the freedom promised by cyberspace is ultimately predicated on a hegemonic logic of displaced subjectivity. How, then, do we, as individuals, relate to this technology?

[Conference Room Tape] | [Observation Deck Tape] | [Observation Deck Notes]

Panelists: Michael Joyce (Vassar Coll), David Kolb (Bates Coll), Mark Poster (UC Irvine), John C. Rowe (UC Irvine)

Moderators: Valerie Allen (USF), David Erben (USF)

Topics:

The notion that virtual space has the possibility of being more democratic than "real life" democracies is a prevalent one. What kind of "Democracy" is practiced in virtual space?

The history of technology is easy to narrate: writing, the wheel, the gun, the factory, electricity, nuclear power, space-travel and so on. But how would we set about charting a history of the very concept of technology?

1pm - Opening statements by panelists
    - discussion/questions fr audience
    - Panelists respond to indiv questions
    - discussion/questions fr audience
3pm End

[Conference Room Tape] | [Observation Deck Tape] | [Observation Deck Notes]

Panelists: N. Catherine Hayles (UCLA), Elizabeth Kaplan (SUNY), Douglas Kellner (Univ Texas), Allucquere Rosanne Stone (Univ Texas), Gregory Ulmer (Univ Florida)

Moderators: Valerie Allen (USF), David Erben (USF)

Topics:

Instead of thinking about resistance to technology as some kind of allergy to computers, is it possible, or desirable, to conceive of our participation in computer literacy as a technology of resistance?

Is not forgetting about the body in VR the same old Cartesian trick which inevitably silences those upon whose labor the very act of forgetting the body is founded?

Schedule:

3:30 - Opening statements by panelists
     - Discussion/audience questions
     - Panelists respond to indiv questions
     - Discussion/audience questions
5:30 - End

Pre-Conference Questions:

Prof Hayles: Is there a relationship between the formal, mathematical foundation of virtual spaces and chaos theory?

Prof's Joyce and Kolb: Do the technologies of representation offered by computers offer an alternative to the mirror, to the limitations of mimetic, causal realism?

Prof Ulmer: In what sense can intellectual and pedagogic exchange be understood as cyberspatial? How does VR help us to (re)conceive the university?

Prof's Poster, Kellner and Rowe: Have the body and matter as concepts been rendered obsolete by V(irtual) R(eality) and what does such a question imply for materialism (dialectical, cultural) and those theoretical positions centered on gendered, ethnic, sexual bodies?

Prof Kaplan: VR and its technologies appear colonized from all sides by white males, indeed, by patriarchy itself. Is woman, then, the new Luddite?

Prof Stone: Are the tools of networking essentially the same as they have been since the telephone, which was the first electronic network prosthesis, or, are computers arenas for social experimentation and dramatic interaction, a medium like public theatre?

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