Week 11: In the loop: Humanity as a network effect
ANTH 3608: Becoming cyborgs—Technology and society (Semester 2,
2025)
October 24, 2025
Main reading: Reno (2012); Rutherford (2021)
Notes
As Temple Grandin famously says of herself, “My mind is similar to an Internet search engine that searches for photographs” (Grandin 2009).
Subjective experience of the world is uniquely private, yet we tend to assume that it rests on the same universal attributes even if the content—the experience—is different for each person. Many people do not process information about the world in the same way, yet communication is still possible. The communication, and the network it both creates and on which it rests is more real than the people, since the idea of a person is really just an ideal. What does that mean for anthropology?
Keywords
semiotic ideology, cybernetics (particularly distributed communication), linguistic technics
Learning outcomes
- Be able to identify the ideological biases embedded in communication technology
- Be able to explain the distinctive qualities of a network paradigm when applied to human culture in general
Class agenda
- Check up on the final project: Go to https://menti.com and use code
5430 7070.- Poll: How far have you gotten?
- Poll: What medium are you using for your presentation?
- Presentation from Ryan
- P-doom, superintelligence, and AI psychosis
- The Turing Test and the “Durkheim test” (Star 1989, 40)
- Mental privacy and theory of mind
- The person as both complete and incomplete
- The naturally competent speaking subject and the subject in dialogue
- Analogy and homology
- Opener presentations: Madeleine E., Ziyu Z., Lifeixue Y.
- Consider how we communicate, not just through technologies, but through gestures? How much do we verbalise? How much are we informed by ‘interpreters’ and transmission of gesture and ‘turn of phrase’? How much can we separate how we interact with each other and the world and technologies?