My Final Paper Topic

For my final paper I want to expand on the conversations from last week and further explore the ideas of the human persona that is created within technological worlds. Using Kelly Dobson’s talk in conjunction with Jennifer Gonzalez’ “The Face and the Public” and “Morphologies” along with Mark Hansen’s “Digitizing the Racialized Body” and Gilles Deleuze’s “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” I want to write about the socio-political ways in which someone can (re)create their virtual selves. How do these “bodies” take on technology as a race? How can the created avatars of real people fully embody the human it is supposed to represent? Is it even made to represent the human who created it? On the other hand, how can technologic bodies (computer/robot) take on the façade of the human? When does this boundary become so blurred that the human has to prove his humanity? On the more socio-political side of this discussion, I want to go into such topics as new frontiers that the Internet can provide; however, are these frontiers legal/why are they not? To answer these questions I will use Obidake’s Blackness project and things like “rape” in Second Life and stalking both online, maybe moving into reality. I’m also fascinated by questions such as: when is it appropriate to “friend” or “poke” someone on Facebook, admit to “stalking” them and how many photos back can we say that we saw? What can we do online that we can do in life appropriately, and what do we that crosses these boundaries? I want to answer how the Internet and Internet relations have changed/challenged conventional ideas of friendship and how humans communicate as it forces us to ask new of ourselves, who we are in life and especially who we are/want to be online.