Subject: (none)
From: Joleen Koehly (jkoehly@ifac.edu )
Date: Tue Feb 08 2000 - 23:35:40 CST
My system will not allow me to reply directly to the EGS thread so
I have to email in directly forgive me if this goes someplace odd
when sent. Thanks JK
I have just discovered that one of my students has been accessing
adult Internet services through my college computer. Seems like a
perfect segway to make an additional comment on desire in the age
of technology.
I am responding to Karin Schneider telling of her computer, her new
experience of the computer as the other and a prosthetic. It seems
to me that Karin and Sandy Stone reference a computer that
functions as a new sense, or sensory experience. My experience is
the opposite and involves the loss of a sense and how this loss
acted as my gateway to the virtual world.
Several years ago, literally, overnight I lost my senses of smell
and taste. In the proverbial blink of an eye I was down two
important sensory functions. Forty percent of my ability to sense
the world around me had vanished. (I’m back up to 20%, taste came
back after about a year.)
What is oddest about this sort of loss is the strange and totally
offensive questions people feel free to ask. One of the most
frequent is “Can you fall in love?,” or sometimes a ruder more to
the point, do you feel (insert rude word for desire.) We
have “bought into” the idea that love and desire are controlled by
smell. (Pheromones?) But, wait, there is no smell in cyberspace,
but there is desire. In the absence of sight, smell, taste, touch
and sound there is love and desire the ability to make a connection
(and shopping.) Courtship. Family. Marketplace. Society.
The absence of the sense of smell in called anosmia, and like every
other disease and condition it has grown its own Internet
community. Cyberspace fascinates with its ability to host vast
numbers of the disabled and disenfranchised, crossing, counter-
crossing and re-crossing in search of love and desire. Is the
desire we search for technological or human? Do we re-gain our
senses with our prosthetic?
Or…
I’m a costume historian by training. I study the evolution of
image. I’ve added film and media studies to my mix because, I
feel, we cannot study the current state of image without studying
communications media. So with my narrowly focused, self-centered,
perspective. Cyberspace “acts” as a disguise, a costume. You
really can cross-dress, gender transfer, be whole again, be
Sleeping Beauty or Cinderella or Thor. The telephone (phone sex?)
fills some of this role, but the voice produces a sensory “clue”
that pushes the listener to make a judgement. The sensory
deprivation of the web removes that element. If we take away the
element of judgement, do we increase the element of desire? This
disguise we “put on” does it make us all equal, and does it like
the example of the cross dressing psychiatrist, give those that
have never had the opportunity before, the chance to shine?
I sat through a most interesting, but numbingly tedious, academic
procedure last Friday. For many colleges and universities the world
of cyberspace appears as a bold new solution to the increasing
problem of the decreasing availability of classroom space. The
gentleman moderating this session was “old school”, from the place
and time that feels collegiality is a gathering, tactile
experience. He told us his story of questioning a student of a
distance learning program as to how that student felt about the
lack of the face to face student instructor exchange. This
particular student, who it turns out, happened to be morbidly
obese, told this man that what he loved about his program, was the
fact that in cyberspace he was not afraid to “speak” out and be
noticed. In cyberspace we are not tied to our bodies and so we can
create bold brave and exciting characters, those multiple
personalities. The people we would be if we weren’t already mired
in our perceptions of ourselves created by the continuous response
to our corporeal selves. In a time and place that is intensely
fascinated by how we look, at the expense of every other sense, we
have deliberately created an invisible society. In our invisible
society we can add new senses, with our experience of the computer,
as an extension of self. We can equalize ourselves, as the young
student has done by putting himself into a world where how he looks
doesn’t matter. We can choose to create worlds for ourselves where
everyone has the same chances to achieve desire and good grades.
(And 18-year-old work-study students can have sex with
professionals for $29.95 a month.)
- Joleen Koehly
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