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<!DOCTYPE html>
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<title> Ici THK — Cyberfeminism </title>
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<h1> <a href="../index.html">Ici THK</a> </h1>
<h2> Deborah Lupton </h2>
<h3> Sociology </h3>
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<aside>
<section id="author">
<h2>About the Author</h2>
<p>Deborah Lupton worked already in 1993 on the analogy
between the communication of technology threats and of
diseases, she presents us the analogy that is voluntary
made between the computer and the body in a hygienic
society where we tend to rely on centralized organisation
to desinfect and sanitize our world. Since then the issue
of scale and control.</p>
</section>
<section id="sources">
<h2>Sources</h2>
<p><a href="../assets/BookChapt_TacticalBiopolitics_subRosa.pdf">
<em>Panic computing: The viral metaphor and computer technology</em></a>,
Cultural Studies, 8:3, pp.556—568, ISSN 0950-2386</p>
</section>
</aside>
<section id="scare">
<h2> Panic computing: The viral metaphor and computer technology </h2>
<p>The unproblematic use of the term 'virus' applied to
technological artefacts, inspire ponderings on the wider
implications of the viral metaphor. The choice of
phraseology in textual accounts and talk, the discursive
devices used, recurrent lexical patterns in describing
things, events, groups or people is revealing of the
latent ideological layer of meaning of such
communications (van Dijk, 1990; Fowler, 1991). In
particular, the intertextuality, or the ways in which
texts selectively draw upon other texts, other cultural
forms and discourses to create meaning, indicates the
political and ideological functions of texts and delimits
the boundaries within which topics may be discussed
(Fairclough, 1992; Astroff and Nyberg, 1992). *The
nomination of a type of computer technology malfunction
as a 'virus'* is a highly significant and symbolic
linguistic choice of metaphor, used to make certain
connections between otherwise unassociated subjects and
objects, to give meaning to unfamiliar events, to render
abstract feelings and intangible processes concrete. In
doing so, the metaphor shapes perception, identity and
experience, going beyond the original association by
evoking a host of multiple meanings (Clatts and Mutchler,
1989: 106-7). As Geertz has argued, '[i]n metaphor one
has.., a stratification of meaning, in which an
incongruity of sense on one level produces an influx of
significance on another' (1973: 210).</p>
</section>
<section id="viruses-and-the-computer-corpus">
<h2>Viruses and the computer corpus</h2>
<p>The present analysis examines in detail the
stratification of meaning evident in the widespread and
largely unquestioned adoption of the viral metaphor to
describe computer technology malfunction in popular
texts. It is argued that the viral metaphor used in the
context of computer technology draws upon a constellation
of discourses concerning body boundaries, erotic
pleasure, morality, invasion, disease and destruction. In
what follows, the meanings of the term 'virus' in the
medical context, the symbiotic relationship between body
and computer metaphorical systems, the symbolic danger of
viruses, the seductiveness of the human/computer,
Self/Other relationship and the cultural crisis around
issues of bodies, technologies and sexualities at the fin
de millénnium are discussed to illuminate the ambivalent
relationship of humans with computer technology in late
capitalist societies.</p>
</section>
<section id="morality-and-viral-politics">
<h2>Morality and viral politics</h2>
<p>There are no "good" Germs or 'normal Germs; all Germs are
bad' (Helman, 1978: 118-19). To counter this attack, as
Cindy Patton points out, bodies are visualized as being
'filled with tiny defending armies whose mission [is] to
return the "self" to the precarious balance of health'
(Patton, 1990: 60). The immune system is commonly
described in popular and medical texts as mounting a
'defence' or 'siege' against 'murderous' viruses or
bacteria which are 'fought', 'attacked' or 'killed' by
white blood cells, drugs or surgical procedures (Martin,
1990; Montgomery, 1991). This military discourse,
redolent with images of physical aggression, has become
routine and standardized to the point where its
metaphorical origins are erased: it is now a 'dead'
metaphor (Montgomery, 1991: 350).</p>
</section>
<section id="the-seduction-and-terror-of-cyberspace">
<h2>The seduction and terror of cyberspace</h2>
<p>The viral metaphor has been adopted in computing
terminology to express the meanings of rapid spread and
invisible invasion of an entity that is able to reproduce
itself and causes malfunctioning on the systemic
level. It is telling that this alternative use has been
so readily accepted that at least one Australian medical
journal has featured articles on computer viruses devoted
to making explicit the similarities between biological
viruses and computer viruses (Dawes, 1992a, 1992b). Just
as the immune system is described in terms of military
imagery, popular accounts of computer viruses commonly
employ the terminology of war to conceptualize the
struggle between technological order and chaos. [....]
Ways of describing computer technology have both created
new terminology which has entered the language and have
drawn upon elements of older, more established lexical
systems. In particular, drawing upon the centuries-old
body/machine discourse, there has developed a symbiotic
metaphorical relationship between computers and humans,
in which computers have been anthropomorphized while
humans have been portrayed as 'organic computers'
(Berman, 1989: 7).The immune system is also commonly
described as an information-processing system,
communicating by means of hormones. By this imagery,
there occurs 'the transformation of the human subject
into an object, a repository, or else a collision site,
for various types of detectable and useable information'
(Montgomery, 1991: 383). Indeed, according to Haraway,
bodies have conceptually become cyborgs
(cyberneticorganisms), that is, 'techno-organic, humanoid
hybrids' (Haraway, 1990:21), or compounds of machine and
body theorized in terms of communications, for which
disease may be conceptualized as 'a subspecies of
information malfunction or communications pathology'
(Haraway, 1989: 15).</p>
</section>
<section id="the-viral-metaphor-and-technophobia">
<h2>The viral metaphor and technophobia</h2>
<p>At the fin de millénnium, the body is a site of toxicity,
contamination and catastrophe, subject to and needful of
a high degree of surveillance and control. Kroker and
Kroker (1988:10 ff.) term the contemporary obsession
with clean bodily fluids as 'Body McCarthyism', an
hysterical new temperance movement. [...] 'Panic
Computing' invokes '[t]he underlying moral imperative
... You can't trust your best friend's software any more
than you can trust his or her bodily fluids - safe
software or no software at all!' (Ross, 1991: 108). The
insertion of an 'infected' disk, that is a 'carrier' of
corruption, spells disaster for the integrity of the
computer corpus. Just as people are exhorted to grill
their sexual partners for details of their past intimate
lives, so as to be 'sure and safe' before proceeding to
exchange bodily fluids, so they are warned to verify the
source and safety of the computer disks they insert into
their PCs (Sontag, 1989: 167).</p>
</section>
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