Body and technology. Virality as a space for contemporary action

The body chooses its spaces, thought chooses its

objects, reason calculates matter, and imagination recreates

everything that maintains it.

FRANCISCO LEON GONZALEZ

Summary

It is not strange to think that virality as a technological characteristic of contemporary communication is increasingly entangled with social structures. It is a common social fact despite the enormous inequalities that life presents today. Virality survives thanks to digitization and the internet. It is from this triple relationship that the virtual outlines different problems, which not only refer to access difficulties, but also to symbolic functionality schemes. The body is one of them. Vitality has the power to restructure the body of the subject to generate communication, hence the body plays a relevant role in relationships through the Internet. This work explores the relationships between the body and technology using vitality as a vertex of reflection.

Abstract

It isn’t estranges to say that virality like technological characteristic of contemporary communication is every time more inoculated with the social structures. Is a common social fact even the huge differences that presents the life today. Virality subsists thanks to two characteristics; by one hand, the digitalization; and the other hand the Internet. Is from this triple relation that virality shows different problems, that not only refers to the difficulty of access, it also refers to the frame of reference of symbolic function. The body is one of them. Virality has the faculty of disrupt person’s body for creates communication, that is why the body plays an important role in the relationships in the Internet. This job explores the relations between body and technology using virality like subject of relaxion.

BODY AND SPIRIT: FLESH AND SUBSTANCE

When we turn our gaze to the cinema it is common to find topics related to technology; for example, on body robotics. In one way or another, whether based on the notion of machine-object, cyborg or avatar, the concern seems to lie in the displacement of the body as carnal physics towards other representations coming from technology, we have many examples in the cinema of this context. In different ways, the body always appears as a future advent of transformation. Whatever the treatment, we may think that these visions only respond to aesthetic ideas, lucubration’s or well-founded or ill-founded premonitions. However, it should be noted that these ideas also belong to other spaces that are not exactly visual. Literature, and more recently plastic arts, contemporary art, incorporate technological premises of the body into their discourse.

The body is an object of concern because there is recognition of it as a center of gravity

not only of existence itself but, above all, because it crosses the entire map of social life. The word body has not only been interpreted as a metonym for human or social actor, but also involves the demand to see the actors as body bearers, that is, subjects of action, through which they carry out the social spectacle. Hence, it is necessary to point out that the body does not exist in itself, it is necessary to anchor it to the subject or actor (social categories) to understand it. Any figure that the body creates, similar to a drawing, appears linked to a cultural practice, to individual use and a collective symbolism: the body draws a set of signs that represent a relationship. The bodily premise lies in that,

The body, shaped by the social and cultural context in which the actor is immersed, is that semantic vector through which the evidence of the relationship with the world is constructed: perceptive activities, but also the expression of feelings, the conventions of the gestural and expressive interaction rites, the staging of appearances, the subtle games of seduction, body techniques, physical training, the relationship with suffering and pain. 1

The body is a door, through it existence enters, customs and practices are absorbed. Up to this point, the body only works as a receptor, a carnal automaton. But the body, as Le Breton says, is also a mechanism of expression, that is, it is part of the construction of collective meanings.

This notion, beyond artistic and aesthetic environments

can be traced in philosophical, anthropological and sociological studies. Concern, as in the cinema, tends to coincide: the finger is placed on the sore of carnal splitting, on the notion of how the body has been separating, dismembering based on technological practices. Later we will deal especially with this metaphor of division. What interests us here is a form of separation, which we can point out as essential to understand the processes of the body, as well as an approach to its conceptualization from the virtual realm. Something that undoubtedly also includes the communicative and sociological act. It is about the separation between body and spirit.

Let us point out, behind what has been said

that the problem of the body is very old, to use an excessive adjective. Pre-Socratic philosophers were already indirectly concerned with metonymic ways of thinking about the body from questions about the origin of man: fire, air, water. Under the figure of natural elements they hid a very interesting game: the questioning of the origin of the world from a body, or in other words, the investigation of the body from another, in this case that of nature. It was Plato –in his Dialogues, especially in the “Timaeus or Nature”–, who after the Pre-Socratic removed the veil from the first body to ask about the second. Under the image of the world, Timaeus comments that God created the body by bringing together the four elements of nature. He endowed it with a soul, gave it senses. Plato unified all the pre-Socratic discourse. In the first instance, these ideas refer us to a synthesis of the Pre-Socratic,