Diagnosing the Computer User Addicted, Infected or Technophiliac

Abstract

This paper explores how computer culture is altering the subjectivity of computer users and culture more broadly. It foregrounds the way language and metaphors of the human body and social body alter with computers and how this affects people's experience of themselves. The mechanical self of plumbing and tubes and sparking on all four cylinders has given way to the hardwired self, with serious identity crises about its insufficient memory banks. The first half of the paper makes use of the metaphor of diagnosis to think about various subjective relations to computers. Addiction, infection and technophilia are elaborated as exciting as well as distributing in their subjective and wider political meanings. The second half of the paper locates computer users historically, using a concept of technology as embodying and perpetuating social relations - including cultural, aesthetic, sexual, economic and political relations. In particular, issues of control, memory and difference are developed and explored.