Prosthetics, Language and Space
1) Stone briefly addresses technology and the shift from sleekness to leaking and derelict looking items. I wonder, what does this say about apple? Not only is there a palpable shift back to sleek and streamlined accessibility, I wonder about the (now outdated) notions that apple products were impervious to viruses, much like prosthetics are sleek imaginations of human body parts, but they operate outside of the human body system. Your prosthetic leg cannot get a blood clot. Where does the apple/pc debate fall in line with this discourse aligning technology and digital spaces with physical topographies/commodities?
2) I’m interested in this idea of authority and agency in digital environments. If authority and agency, as Stone notes, is predicated on ‘presence,’ then I’m interested in the way language acts to impose some sense of presence to digital spaces. For instance, using shields for virus protection or calling the gateway to the Internet an ‘explorer.’
3) In the same vein, with Sobchack in mind, what are the ways language creates a terrain that’s imaginable in physical terms, to incite both self-surveillance and notions of physicality to understand this landscape? Also, how does shifting the use of a descriptive word (using it as an adjective or noun, etc) alter our understanding of both what it is describing as well as what it signifies physically?