it is not our potential forms of disembodiment that make us posthuman but rather the way in which this historical movement away from prior cultural forms of embodiment are understood. (White and Wesch 2012: Introduction)
Jennifer Cool
Cyberorganics: Neighborhood cooperative, social clique, professional network, Internet start-up business in the early 1990s; centered around Ramona Avenue in San Francisco, which included a LAN (local area network) that bridged different apartments. Also had weekly community potluck dinners.
Why important: Richard Florida’s Creative Class – the creative class is located in particular hot-spots, but its influence extends wider because of this group’s ability to spur regional economic growth through innovation. No-collar workers.
Edward Glaeser’s Triumph of the City – Glaeser’s main point is that cities, and not suburbs or rural towns, are crucial to future living. Skyscrapers are better than small-scale urban neighborhoods because the are more environmentally, economically, and socially more efficient. Even with information technologies, face-to-face interaction and the concentration of talent are necessary.
Onground vs. offline?
Soja: physical world divided into a physical triad (space, time, and matter); the existential triad (spatiality, temporality, and social being) constitute human existence. The physical and existential triads are mediated through language and socialization. Cool’s point is that CMC blurs/shifts/disrupts this mediation, but that it does not dematerialize everything.
colocation—the colocation of people, jobs, and social activities together in particular places and channels of communication— that applies equally online and onground.