An aspect of the development of cyberspace which I think Sandy Stone doesn’t fully address is the question of why we are using technology to separate ourselves from out bodies. She well describes this separation. Stone writes about how Frances Barker suggests that the body has become privatized in new ways, writing, “In Barker’s account, beginning in the 1600s in England, the body became progressively more hidden, first because of changing conventions of dress, later by conventions of spatial privacy…the self…retreated further inward, until much of its means of expression was through texts. Thus according to Barker, the body transitioned from “a socially visible object to one which can no longer be seen (Barker 1984:13).” The body is retreating from the public sphere to the private. Stone then argues that the descent of the body into cyberspace is a continuation of this withdrawal. Stone comments on some of the implications of this “decoupling the body and the subject,” such as the changing of the boundaries between technology and nature, and the ways we can represent bodies on a “narrow bandwidth representational medium.” However, Stone never discusses why we are hiding ourselves away in this manner in the first place.
To me, it seems like we the reason we are retreating away from our bodies is to have more control over our social projections. We want to fully direct how others perceive us. And technology has given the capability for this control.
Many of us are naturally insecure about how we appear. Maybe we believe that we are too heavy or too awkward. But with full control over our online appearance, we can be perceived in ways not limited by physical constraints. For example, I might rather have someone know me by an amazing looking body that I think ideally represents me online than by my real body.
Annihilation of the body in virtual reality or cyberspace gives us total control over how others perceive us. We can perfect our social projections. Instead of our bodies causing us to be perceived in a way we don’t want, we can perfectly control and edit the human imperfections out of how we look with technology, as we could with the pen and paper before it. As professor Fitzpatric mentioned in class, almost everyone on Second Life looks “hot.”
This is my personal opinion on the shift away from our bodies, but I would have wanted Stone to write something explaining it in her essay. The closest I think Stone comes to describing the motivation for our shift away from our bodies and into to cyperspace is when she writes “it seems to be the engagement of the adolescent male within humans of both sexes that is responsible for the seductiveness of the cybernetic mode.” However, I believe here she suggests that a sexual urge to “penetrate” a new space is partially responsible for our desires to go online, but that doesn’t explain why we seem to want to leave our bodies behind.