Week 9: To Immerse or Embed?

Lahti and Haraway talk about the concepts of embeddedness and immersion through the context of modern technology, namely, cyborgs and videogames. While Lahti believes that technology has the power to transport you to another world, Haraway thinks that technology offers a new perspective and acts as a role model with methods that can be integrated into the current world. Haraway’s ideal society builds on the idea that humans can learn from technology to assimilate into a well-run circuit.

Both researchers focus on different areas of the technological realm. Lahti dives into the capabilities of videogames, and provides a chronology that demonstrates how over the years, they have enhanced the concept of virtual reality. With each reiteration, the premise of another world was expanded. As a result, players are able to escape the reality of the present world and enter into the illusion created by the videogame. From his perspective, technology works as the alternative to reality and is moving humans further into imagined dimensions. On the other hand, Haraway focuses her argument on cyborgs and their anthropomorphic qualities. She views technology as a more advanced being, superior to the human. She connects this concept to feminist ideas, using the bridge that machines do not have gender and thus are all equal. If humans followed this example and disregarded gender, she believes it would be progressive for the feminist movement. Haraway goes on to review how humans can learn from machines to incorporate ideals into society.

Lahti and Haraway have thus developed two contrasting interpretations of the role of technology through their studies. Lahti has emphasized the idea of immersion: the concept that technology serves to completely immerse humans into a different world that is disconnected from reality. However, Haraway thinks that instead of immersing oneself in technology, it would be better to embed it into everyday life. From her perspective, the worlds of reality and technology should not become separate, but instead joined together so that imperfect humans can learn from the example of genderless machines.

Haraway expands her idea of embeddedness in a way that constructs a view of the ideal society. She stresses the idea that each individual should function as part of the circuit that runs society. In this aspect, she includes socialist ideas of equality and interdependence. Her views differ from utopian approaches because she does not advocate a complete restructuring of society, but rather a blending of cyborg ideas with the values of humanity.

While Haraway believes technology should be embedded for ideal socialism and feminism, Lahti believes it serves as an escape into another dimension. Immersion and embeddedness offer two different perspectives on the role of technology in the modern world.

2 Comments

  1. To some extent immersion and embeddedness are two different perspectives on technology, but importantly, they coexist. We are always immersed in our habitual understanding of the world, we are not able to see what is normal to us, it becomes the background to experience. Likewise, we are embedded in systems that organise society, always. To my mind, embeddedness has more to do with a systems theory or constructivist approach, where we can acknowledge our role in the mechanisms of the social/technical/political world.

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