By N. Katherine Hayles
University of Chicago Press, 2012
$25.00, ISBN: 978-0-226-32142-4
Review by Jessi Thomsen
University of Chicago Press, 2012
$25.00, ISBN: 978-0-226-32142-4
Review by Jessi Thomsen
In How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis (2012), N. Katherine Hayles asserted that we think “through, with, and alongside media” (p. 1). She argued for connections between cognition, technology, humanity, and evolution. She both described and performed these complex connections by engaging print-based texts, databases, historical technology, and digital archives.
N. Katherine Hayles. Image used with permission from N. Katherine Hayles.
N. Katherine Hayles is a Professor of Literature and the Director of Graduate Studies in the Literature Program at Duke University. She has won numerous prestigious awards and grants for her research and writing. In addition to How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis, she has written How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics; My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts; and Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary, among other books. She has also authored and co-authored numerous articles and chapters exploring technology, literature, critical theory, science, and cognition. For a full list of publications, digital text resources, full text articles, and links to her blog and lectures, visit her website.
Hayles connected humanity and technology in ways that match our intuitive understanding—ways that researchers and academics often resist. There is much to react to and question in her book, as the concepts are both provocative and progressive. How We Think illustrated tensions between humanity and technology: their historical contexts and the possibilities of their coevolution.