What is it to be Human

What is it to be human?

We have entered into a post human world where the very status of humanity is at risk, where “the abstract person obscures the real person” (Lanier, 2010).

“What is it to be human now?” In an era where the Internet (a great computational cloud) is considered more powerful than the human brain, we are awash in a tsunami of fragmentary, interpersonal communication, which has demeaned interpersonal communication.  Yet we consider this human progress.

Cyberworld is a space where people spend increasing amounts of time in a relationship with a computer, not a person.  Therefore, a person can be said to live a cyberlife when digital connections subsume human face-to-face connections in real time. A cyberlife is a life lived differently in three modes:

1. Boundary transformation

   
   

2. Speed, velocity

   
   

3. Time, instantaneity

   
   

Our US population is a cyber-population living a large proportion of its waking time in cyberlife.  We text, tweet, use Facebook, create online virtual lives (e.g., Second life), become fixated on YouTube, obsess with mobile phone online apps, entertain, and work..  There is a new electronic language in texting (txting), which has supplanted vocal communication. 2b or not 2b that is the ?

The role of immediacy, of instant feedback and gratification overdetermine human response. People experience frustration from being merely mortal, compared to a machine. We have slower rates of recognition, response, cognition, and motor reaction than an AI (Artificial Intelligence).  Yet social networks abound.  We have LinkedIn’s  “connections,” Twitter’s “followers,” and Facebook’s “friends.”

Intersubjectivity requires a human-to-human organic interaction in real time at a pace appropriate for reception, recognition, and reflectivity.  To experience subjectivity is to experience self or self states, forms of identity, and the ability to create meaning and communicate it to another person or group. Intersbjectivity requires connection, the ability to contain various self-states and communications, the creation of alliances, and the co-creation of meanings.  Cyber life affects the process of organic intersubjective relations. Such as self and identity as the conceptions of self and identity, language, culture, politics and global relations has changed.  Instead a new “cybertronic self“ has been created, which is a construction of a human identity without geographic, material, or sensory contexts and cues, who is projected into and through cyberspace forever. This image easily conjures images of annihilation anxiety depicted in Munch’s portrait of “The Scream.”

Identity of place (home) is challenged when nation-state, or geographic community no longer identifies people. Rituals will no longer hold as much power in providing reassurance. Displacement issues erase the sense of security of human bonds and of home. The speed and amount of information overloads nervous systems and is hyper-stimulating. Hyper-stimulation becomes conditioned by electronic, economic, and entertainment media.  Memory for events and impact of events get erased or forgotten at a faster pace due to sheer amount of data.  Often there is no time to reflect or make intersubjective connections. Ergo, no meanings are derived from which to form a stable personal identity.

Cyber culture creates an environment to enable living virtually in several identities, so that fragmentation arises, since part-lives lack core identity.

When the word connections comes up we don’t consider the relational vernacular, where connection connotes intimate, personal, interactive, intersubjective connection.  Instead, it’s cyber connections, the Internet, computers, or other mobile device for social networking.Cyberlife obviates human bonding, invokes anonymity and crowd identity over individual subjective and intersubjective states.  However, only if we buy into the illusion that digital representations can capture all about human relationships.  It’s up 2 u…………..