In the first chapter of How We Became Posthuman, Hayles focuses greatly on the idea that information can be separated from any physical entity where it might be housed. Since this book was written quite recently, I think that when she talks about contemporary ideas or beliefs, the ideas she refers to are probably not obsolete or unknown to us. She writes, "...a defining characteristic of the present cultural moment is the belief that information can circulate unchanged among different material substrates" (1). This, I believe, is an assertion that many would agree is accurate, especially when mediums like the internet and the television have gained such a prominent role in people's lives. Of course, our class has discussed at length whether information really can be introduced and shared through new media without undergoing some slight (or significant) change in meaning or impact. Hayles probably doesn't think that information gets passed along without any change, but sees information as something that doesn't rely on a specific material in order to have meaning.
Regardless, Hayles goes beyond this seemingly benign statement that information can pass through different mediums into something perhaps more complex and difficult to reconcile when she writes, "...a conception of information as a (disembodied) entity that can flow between carbon-baed organic components and silicon-based electronic components to make protein and silicon operate as a single system. When information loses its body, equating humans and computers is especially easy, for the materiality in which the thinking mind is instantiated appears incidental to its essential nature" (2).
Perhaps on of Hayles' points is that technology is reaching a point where the human being (as a physical structure) is no longer essential for sharing information. Indeed, it seems that if there were a way to separate (as she writes at the start of this book) the mind from the body, the development of ideas and innovation might not suffer too great a loss, "...information is increasingly perceived as interpenetrating material forms...From here it is a small step to perceiving information as more mobile, more important, more essential than material forms. When this impression becomes part of your cultural mindset, you have entered the condition of virtuality" (19).
In response to the blogging prompt for this week, I would say that although Hayles does, of course, respond to social and technological changes, she also helps to create this new world. Hayles observed the treatment of information and technology and began to identify this idea of being 'posthuman' to the way that she (and others) were starting to think, "...an 'I' transformed into the 'we' of autonomous agents operating together to make a self" (6).
Turner writes in From Counterculture to Cyberculture, that Stewart Brand initially fears nuclear threats because"...an invasion might prevent his achieving personal independence and on how it would force him to become a member of a gray, uninspired, Orwellian mass" (42). Turner goes on to describe human culture and interaction as an information system, one that seems capable of being regulated and maintained. It seems difficult to understand the nature of culture, which Turner brings up, when it becomes something necessary in order to preserve society instead of a natural and, perhaps, organic process. He writes, "At a moment when humans threatened to destroy themselves with nuclear weapons, concrete expressions of culture offered a way to help them move forward and escape annihilation" (44). If human interaction can be understood as an information system, then these 'concrete' demonstrations of culture appear to be something quite manufactured. However, unlike Hayles, Turner also seems to stress the importance of the individual and he summarizes the views of Ruesch and Bateson when he writes that they "...viewed social life as a system of communication and the individual as both a key element within that system and a system in his or her own right" (53). Whether or not the individual's capacity to share information is important and whether this ability is linked to a physical structure is not explored, but it is interesting to think about. If Turner takes Hayles' ideas that information can pass from one material to another without change and it can also be separated from human beings, then perhaps it is not the individual that is a key element of the system, but rather the information they can contribute.
I would just add on to your last point about Hayles that, whether or not she is helping create this new world, that is certainly here intention. I think that Hayles very much sees her own work here as a kind of intervention into this new posthuman life that we are starting to live. Hayles thinks that we can go either one of two ways on this. The political stakes are high for her: a lot depends on whether we choose an understanding of technology that acknowledges our embodied existence, or one that denies it.
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