Now, before talking about the
lecture itself, I have to start by crediting Prof Sue Thomas as having been one
of the biggest influences on my post – though without her intending it, or
knowing it. As founder and guiding spirit of Amplified Leicester and
CreativeCoffee Club (for the years it was funded by DMU), she's helped create
many opportunities to meet, connect with and get to know interesting people,
many of whom were interested in me and my work for Leicester Council of Faiths.
I've come to rely on many of these people as part of my professional support
network. Some are my friends. Sue didn't do this deliberately of course, nor
did she do so deliberately for me. Undoubtedly there are many people able to
say similar things about how they've benefited from Professor Sue's work. It
was largely through situations and networks she established and into which I
was welcomed that I came to see how my work (and the institution I work for)
could be located within varied, often surprising, strands of the wider cultural
life in the city of Leicester - and beyond. Significantly, it was also through
these networks that I became aware of the affordances of social media and how I
might exploit them in my work. My involvement with CreativeCoffee Club and
Amplified Leicester helped set the tone for the last four years and more of my
work. For good or ill, faithful reader, you could call Prof Sue Thomas the
Godmother of this blog! After all, I'm a big fan of giving credit where it's
due.
In the earliest days of my post
when I was a bit clueless about how to get off the ground, I attended the
second-ever meeting of CreativeCoffee Club, back in the days when it took place
at DMU Graduate Bar every other Wednesday morning (handy for me, since I lived
only ten minutes walk from there at that time). Some folk wondered what, as an
employee of a faith-based organisation, I was doing there. There were times
when I wondered that myself! But this was the first such group I was able to
tap into - and the beginning of serious networking on my part over the last
five years.
I wasn't part of the first,
formal iteration of Amplified Leicester (which was essentially a course) though
I wish I had been. I reckon I was not only the first person to apply to be on
it, but also the first to withdraw my name. I just couldn't make that kind of
regular weekly commitment fit my unpredictable work pattern at that time. So I
could have been a peripheral figure as far as Amplified Leicester was
concerned, but I wasn't content to let that happen either. I still got as much
as possible out of that, even if I had to do so as a twelfth man.
Both CreativeCoffee Club and
Amplified Leicester feature extensively throughout this blog (see, for example,
the post on Amplified Communities of Faith or Belief, a panel
presentation that Sue asked me to convene at Phoenix Square Film & Digital
Media Centre, Wednesday 23 March 2011).
Well, as far as this evening is concerned: it starts
off typically, for a Sue Thomas event, when we're asked to ensure that our
phones are turned on, so we can tweet throughout, using the
hashtag #technobiophilia. Technobiophilia: Nature and
Cyberspace is the title of Sue’s forthcoming book, due out in
2013. Find out more about it here. I'm unable to do much tweeting, as there's no service
for O2 in the lecture theatre.
Here's Sue's own synopsis of
the main themes of her lecture, taken from her website:
The act of entering cyberspace
was, along with the entering of outer space, one of the most profound
experiences of the twentieth century. In 1969, humans landed first
"on" the moon (July), and then "in" cyberspace (September)
with the connection of the first two nodes of the internet. Today the mountains
of the Moon remain neglected and unexplored, but cyberspace has evolved into a
deeply familiar habitat whose geography has been shaped by those who built and
used it. This lecture will explore the evolution of the landscape of cyberspace
from its creation as an unpopulated wilderness through its exploration,
colonisation, cultivation, settlement and growth, and offers some predictions
for the future of this most exotic place.
Rather than paraphrase or
summarise the whole lecture (succinct as it was, lasting hardly more than 35
minutes), I advise you to follow this link to the slides. I'll pick up on a few things that were
of special interest to me though.
It's hardly possible to discuss the future of
cyberspace without reviewing its past and considering how it’s come to its
present situation. To this end, we kick off with a fascinating video, The Internet
of Things. In her review of the past and present of cyberspace
(the realm we enter when we connect to the internet), Sue pays special
attention to its relationship with nature. As the lecture progresses, this
becomes her central concern. There’s long been an assumption that one is
opposed to the other, that the virtual world and the natural world are mutually
exclusive – an assumption Sue tests out in different ways at various points
this evening.
Sue highlights how the metaphors we use to talk about
cyberspace (and our experience of it) are so frequently drawn from nature. This
is of special interest to me as it connects with Lackoff & Johnson's Metaphors We
Live By (1980) a book that I've long found influential. But natural
things don’t naturally belong in cyberspace. We put them there because we want
them to be there - and this is a function of biophilia (definition: “The innate tendency
to focus on life and lifelike processes” E.O. Wilson, 1984).
Biophilia is not just
aesthetically pleasing. It soothes us in cyberspace. Sue extends Wilson's
definition to the new term, technobiophilia:
“The innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes as they
appear in cyberspace.”
Sue leaves us with a vision of the
future of cyberspace involving, at the very least, not seeing it as being
oppositional to nature. Being connected to one doesn’t necessarily mean being
disconnected from the other - indeed the only viable future for both involves
reinforcing that relationship, which might take us down some unusual and
unpredictable roads. This is illustrated with a weird and wonderful
video, Philip
Beesley's Hylozoic Ground. This term, hylozoism, is
a new one to me: the philosophical point of view that all matter
(including the universe as a whole) is in some sense alive. Now there’s food
for thought!
