Human limits

1. The Visible Human Project: Life and death in cyberspace – Catherine Waldby
This article is a valuable resource for understanding the Visible Human Project, and the questions it raises about the limits of being human, and human identity. The author explores the ambiguity of the identity status of the visible male and female through the ideas of life after death, and the boundary between the real and virtual worlds. She questions how these two people should be viewed in light of their translation from physical reality into a dataset on a computer, accessible to anyone with the Internet. While the article is fairly concise and does not delve too far into these issues, it is a perfect starting point for beginning to understand the methodology and purpose of the Visible Human Project, along with its significance in terms of pushing the limits of what it means to be human. The questions raised by the article are useful for working out where to focus further research for the essay question.

2. Constructions and reconstructions of self in virtual reality: Playing in the MUDs – Sherry Turkle
Sherry Turkle’s article talks about the construction of self in the virtual world, specifically in MUDs. Her research, which includes several case studies of MUD players, raises important questions about the limits of human identity. By focussing on the effects of simulation of identity on a person’s identity in ‘real’ life, Turkle’s article helps to explore the limits of human experience. She shows the way in which a person’s ability to create a whole new identity in the virtual world, and their experience of this identity often results in them re-evaluating their actions in the ‘real’ world. One disadvantage to the article is that it was written in 1994, and with the rapid pace of technological change, much of the technology has significantly advanced since then. However, most of the ideas in the article are still relevant to today’s technology. The relevance of the article to the essay question lies in its explorations of the boundaries between a person’s real life and virtual identities, and how this affect’s society’s ideas of sense of self.

3. Augmentation, symbiosis, transcendence: technology and the future(s) of human identity – Walter Truett Anderson
Anderson discusses in his article the rapid pace of technological change and the possible effects this may have on society’s ideas of human nature. By using science fiction as a focus, he pulls out three main themes: augmentation, symbiosis and transcendence, of where the human species may be headed in the future, and comparing this to actual technology, he analyses the effects this may have. While several aspects of this article are mainly hypothesising, Anderson also raises some important questions about how technology is affecting the way society defines being human. By looking into how the human body is evolving through technology, the article shows changing attitudes about the limits of being human. Through its use of science fiction to illustrate the different types of human ‘enhancement’, this article would be useful in answering the essay question in its exploration of the relationships between the body and the idea of humanity.

4. New technology vs. human identity: postmodernism and a new identity? – Tejumade Aderele
While not a scholarly article, this blog post is an interesting discussion of the effects of biotechnology on human identity. The author questions the boundaries between physical and emotional identities and bodies, and how this affects interaction in both real and virtual worlds, eventually coming to the conclusion that human identity is enhanced by technology, rather than threatened. Whether or not this is the case is debatable, but by bringing in ideas from scholars such as Baudrillard and Marx, this article is useful in looking into the fusion of man and machine and how this affects the idea of being human, particularly in its examination of how identity is formed and the relationships between the ‘real’ and the ‘virtual’.

5. Human Remains: Identity Politics in the Face of Biotechnology – Annette Burfoot
Annette Burfoot’s article takes a different approach by looking at the importance of the body as the site of identity through a feminist viewpoint. It talks about the different effects science fiction has on society’s view of humans, and questions ideas about post-humanism. Burfoot discusses the body as a site of social construction and this can be useful towards the discussion of how the body affects the idea of the essence of being human. This article draws from a lot of different theories and this can be difficult to read through as it is fairly dense in several aspects. However, after reading it a few times the author’s points become clearer, and she makes several relevant arguments about the posthuman and what it means for human identity, as well as the role of the body.