“Boundaries in networked digital societies: Membranes as a new model of boundaries focusing on nonconscious cognition” presented by Nam

Boundaries in networked digital societies: Membranes as a new model of boundaries focusing on nonconscious cognition

Boundaries have provided humans a frame of understanding and foundation for social structures – like hierarchies, classes, and races. Acknowledging the development of technology has brought significant changes in human life, this paper explores a new model of boundaries that fits into a networked digital society and reexamines the idea of boundaries/borders as a solid wall that separates, segregates, isolates, and disconnects. Instead of a concrete wall, this paper suggests considering membranes as a model for boundaries in the technological era because of their semi-permeable and fluid nature, as well as their active engagements in relations/interactions between heterogeneous bodies. This idea of membranes in a technological society is exemplified in political borders, control mechanisms, and human-nonhuman cognition. Katherine Hayles’s discussions of cognisphere and nonconsciousness illustrate the semi-permeability of the boundaries between human and technological cognition, highlighting their interdependency and continuous inflows/outflows of information on the nonconscious level. The author introduces the process of creating an interactive art project Surrogate Being to demonstrate how the author experienced such a membrane-like boundary between heterogeneous yet interconnected modes of (digital and biological) memories about the same place.