As technology becomes more advanced, our society becomes more advanced as well. Katherine Hayles, author of “Toward Embodied Virtuality” recognized this, and took it a step further by explaining how our society is not only advancing with technology, but is becoming more and more like technology itself. She worries that by doing so, we are becoming disembodied beings. The women in Stepford Wives and Ash in Black Mirror are great examples of this shift in humanity. By taking a look at how these characters were changed by technology, this essay will show that by looking at our bodies as objects and not as an important part of our being, we are becoming more like cyborgs and straying from humanity.
In Stepford Wives, the “women” were, to the men, absolutely perfect. These “women” cooked and cleaned all day. Their houses were spotless and their children were always looked after. They were always polite and never asked any questions. They had no curiosities or doubts regarding their husbands. This; however, was not because of how they were raised or the morals they held. No, it was because that was how they were made. Everything about the once human women, was traded out for much better behaved and mannerly androids. The bodies and souls of the human women were not regarded with respect or care. The thought that these women were people-people who loved, laughed, cried, lived was not even considered. They were seen as objects. As something to be changed and altered. But they didn’t have the means to actually change their wives, so they opted to create copies of them instead and transferred the altered minds of the women into androids.
Because the men did this, they moved away from humanity and toward an embodied virtuality. Hayles was not against humans using technology to better themselves, but was afraid of “posthumans who regard their bodies as fashion accessories rather than the ground of being” (5). Hayles tried to explain that when the human body is seen only as an object, as something we possess, then we are moving away from humanity itself. Now this doesn’t mean we can’t celebrate technology as it advances and use it to build a better life for ourselves. Hayles is just trying to say that once we move from loving and celebrating technology to “being seduced by fantasies of unlimited power and disembodied immortality” we stray from what makes us human (5).
This also matched up with how Ash was created in Black Mirror. Ash was once a human character on the show; however, after he died his wife, Martha, could not take the grief and was signed up for a service that lets you talk to your dead loved one by transferring data onto a phone. At first Martha was opposed to this, but after she discovered she was pregnant, she couldn’t deny it any longer: she needed to talk to him. Texting with Ash slowly becomes not enough and she soon gives the service all of his videos so she can actually talk to him. This leads to a desperate purchase of an android that looks just like him and acts just like him. It has most of his personality, although he is still missing something, and Martha eventually comes to realize this.
Some people today still think that by placing one’s consciousness into a machine, we can get rid of the boundaries held by our own bodies. Hayles commented on this by stating, “Yet the cultural contexts and technological histories in which cellular automata theories are embedded encourage a comparable fantasy-that because we are essentially information, we can do away with the body” (12). They believe that it would turn the machine into a perfect copy of the human that once lived and that there would be no downfalls. As it was seen in Ash and the women of Stepford, that was not the case. Just like Hayles believes, in the action of doing away with the body we are getting rid of an important part of ourselves and this world.
As Hayles explains in “Toward Embodied Virtuality” it is not right to view the body as an object and the mind as solely who we are. Just because our mind is filled with information, doesn’t mean our body doesn’t attribute to who we are as beings. Once we start to view our bodies as objects and do away with them, we become more and more like disembodied beings. Beings that are like us, but who fall short from who we actually are.