We Are Borg: Cyborgs and the Subject of Communication

Gunkel, David J.

doi:10.1111/j.1468-2885.2000.tb00195.x

Cited by 19 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…That is, one of the things to be appreciated about the compositional character of some mashups is their rhetorical prowess of expression to machines, for humans. The contribution of this article is not so much in the fact that machines can make media for persons, or even in instances where machines share creative agency with persons to create media in a sort of "cyborg" shared agency between human and machine (Gunkel 2000) as they produce media. Rather, it is from the other direction, wherein machines are approached as consumers of media.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Machinic enculturation, copyright bots, and the aesthetics of composing mashups for machines

Coleman

Anthoney

2020

Journal of Aesthetics & Culture

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Sample-based media producers compose their art for machines. They implement aural effects and editing techniques to their source media, which very directly affect the sound of their music, but the aesthetics of which are not aimed at human ears; they are aimed at convincing copyright bots their media is not worth "flagging." We offer machinic enculturation as a term descriptive of the phenomenon of adapting one's media practices to machinic audiences. Then, using the basic operations of rhetoric (addition, omission, transposition, and transmutation) and a stylistic framework (antithesis, apostrophe, and reasoning by question and answer), we demonstrate a born-digital aesthetic, moored in the rhetorical prowess of some producers as they compose their music for copyright bots.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Machinic enculturation, copyright bots, and the aesthetics of composing mashups for machines

Coleman

Anthoney

2020

Journal of Aesthetics & Culture

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“…There is rising fuzziness between human and machine categories and advances in cyborg potentials both in very literal and material integrations (e.g., mechanical limbs, biomimetic technology; Barfield & Williams, 2017) and in looser configurations (e.g., a person wearing a watch or using a keyboard; see Gunkel, 2000). Following, there are less-concrete distinctions among modes of (non-)aliveness compared to our traditional understandings of those states (Jipson & Gelman, 2007).…”

Section: Ontological Shiftsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Toward an Agent-Agnostic Transmission Model: Synthesizing Anthropocentric and Technocentric Paradigms in Communication

Banks¹,

Graaf

2020

HMC

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Technological and social evolutions have prompted operational, phenomenological, and ontological shifts in communication processes. These shifts, we argue, trigger the need to regard human and machine roles in communication processes in a more egalitarian fashion. Integrating anthropocentric and technocentric perspectives on communication, we propose an agent-agnostic framework for human-machine communication. This framework rejects exclusive assignment of communicative roles (sender, message, channel, receiver) to traditionally held agents and instead focuses on evaluating agents according to their functions as a means for considering what roles are held in communication processes. As a first step in advancing this agent-agnostic perspective, this theoretical paper offers three potential criteria that both humans and machines could satisfy: agency, interactivity, and influence. Future research should extend our agent-agnostic framework to ensure that communication theory will be prepared to deal with an ostensibly machine-inclusive future.receiving of messages (Gunkel, 2012). In turn, early human-computer interaction studies took up the dynamics of software and hardware-from hypertext to peripherals-as efficient tools for users' activities (Myers, 1998). Despite the centrality of human goals and influences to human-computer interaction, technologists often consider humans only in terms of their actions (Kaptelinin, 2012). That is, users present "human problems, " both in reference to the problems that humans face and solve through technology (Blomqvist, 2018, para. 3) and in reference to how humans create problems to which technology must be resilient (Kletz, 1982, p. 209).Arguably, one of the simplest but most foundational frameworks for understanding communication as a dyadic process is the transmission model of communication (Shannon & Weaver, 1949), in which sources create messages that are then encoded into signals sent over channels (through some degree of noise) then decoded for consumption by receivers. Taken in terms of this model, scholarship within communication disciplines often characterizes machines merely as channels, and scholarship within the technological disciplines tends to characterize humans merely as senders or receivers. The parceling out of human and machine roles across disciplines is part of each domain's strength in building rich understandings of those roles. However, such parceling is also each domain's weakness in that disciplinary blinders prevent important integration of theoretical and empirical work given that the boundaries of what counts as "human" and "machine" are increasingly blurred.Although some contend the transmission model is obsolete (e.g., for rigidity and linearity; Day, 2000), we argue that the model is a useful tool for approaching emerging sociotechnical phenomena. The model focuses on core communicative functions independent of agent type, and such independence is fundamental for initially catalyzing necessary integration between human-focused and technology-fo...

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“…It is not only fashion journalism that is obsessed with sending messages; many theorists working in communication studies are also preoccupied with this model. David Gunkel (2000), for example, uses the idea of the Borg, or the cyborg, to critique the sender/receiver model of communication. However, even though I have argued that the sender/receiver is and always has been completely inappropriate to the task of explaining fashion, given the resilience and the prevalence of this model, I would like to use Gunkel's critical account of the cyborg in the sender/receiver model to introduce the role of the technological or the prosthetic to the notions of fashion and communication.…”

Section: Fashion Journalismmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The second section will explain the sender/receiver model in a little more detail and outline the three major problems with this model. It will use the explanation to introduce David Gunkel's (2000) arguments around the cyborg, a human/machine "hybrid" as he has it, and to present some limitations and weaknesses in the conception of the prosthesis as he uses it in the notion of the cyborg. The third section will move on to semiological models of communication and use Derrida's (2010) conception of the constitutive prosthesis to critique both Gunkel's conception of the cyborg and the model of communication as it is found in semiological models.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fashion as communication revisited

Barnard

2020

Popular Communication

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The essay introduces the sender/receiver model of communication and fashion communication by reviewing some recent fashion journalism. It then argues that there are three major problems with this model. The essay then introduces and critiques various arguments around the cyborg, a human/machine "hybrid" as some theorists present it, and argues that there are limitations and weaknesses in the conception of the prosthesis as it is found in the notion of the cyborg. The essay then analyses semiological models of communication and uses Derrida's (2010) conception of the constitutive prosthesis to critique both traditional conceptions of the prosthesis and the model of communication as it is found in semiological models. Finally, the essay identifies some major consequences of the constitutive prosthesis for fashion and the explanation of fashion as communication.

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We Are Borg: Cyborgs and the Subject of Communication

Cited by 19 publications

References 22 publications

Machinic enculturation, copyright bots, and the aesthetics of composing mashups for machines

Machinic enculturation, copyright bots, and the aesthetics of composing mashups for machines

Toward an Agent-Agnostic Transmission Model: Synthesizing Anthropocentric and Technocentric Paradigms in Communication

Fashion as communication revisited

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