This week my Tumblog hasn’t seen a lot of action principally due to home dynamics [sick children]

Between the bouts of illness I did manage to tend to an area of concern that was niggling at the corners of my mind. I wanted to ‘show’ [myself / anybody] what I meant when talking about the rhizomatic nature of the Tumblog in Gatherings. The image in the original post didn’t sit comfortably with me…it sort of felt inadequate.

What better way to do this then to use the Tumblogs themselves. Collecting all of our Tumblog walls in one artifact meant that although each contributor could recognise their own work it resulted in the gathering of several to form one. My wall rhizome image did end up looking somewhat similar to a scorpion though this was accidental. Perhaps if held upside down or diagonal it will take a different form, varying from one interpretation to the next.

The concept of cyborg remained at the surface of my thoughts this week , asking questions over how technology, such as Google Glass, could add to us becoming cyborg-like. This raised questions of privacy, ownership and social immersion. The cyborg is embedded within the fibres of sci-fi…how exciting to uncover another contemporary real life example.

While there is a temptation to state that week Twelve of the Tumblog will be spent tying loose ends together I actually feel that this is the wrong way for me to view the remaining time. I hope to spend this time giving final nurture to the roots and shoots bursting from the experience of all that is EDC.

Last week I posted of new feelings towards my Tumblog, seeing it as a rhizomatic landscape. Taking steps from the single to the multiple, the essence of the Tumblog changes. Through interaction, experimentation and communication we create a networked  kaleidoscopic mesh.  For me, the image above illustrates how the meshing of all of our Tumblogs showcase the roots and tubers of our learning.

At the dinnertable two weeks ago my teenage son told me of a revolutionary visual aid that changes how we can ‘see’ the world. All hail Google Glass! Imagine my surprise to read an article during the week on the same subject in the Independent explaining the detrimental ramifications of such technology as expressed by social technology movement Stop the Cyborgs.

Over the past couple of weeks I have been trying to find examples of real life cyborg in today’s world. At the beginning of my reflection on cyborgs I questioned the need for the attachment of conscience in the creation of cyborg, hammered home by an unequivocal belief in the non-human component’s merger with the human body. Does Google Glass take such a melting of the two a step further? The technology has a social immersion aspect that not only has the potential to change how we see but possibly how we live.

“[t]he world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as in an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside.”(McLuhan, 1962, p.32)

McLuhan, M. (1962) The Gutenberg galaxy: the making of typographic man. Toronto: University of Toronto Press