You are
What you do
When it counts.
John Steakley
Armor

When I first read this quotation it seemed like a fundamental truth. And I liked it. In those big moments of life, we need to show up and do great things.

It reminded me of the archetypal pattern of storytelling, the hero’s quest, in which, our hero receives a call to action, goes on an adventure, does great things, and returns home to great rewards. According to mythologist Joseph Campbell, it is one of the archetypes which transcends culture and is hard-wired in our psyches. Lord of the Rings and Star Wars are based on the hero’s quest. They are epic stories, in which our heros battle monsters and the powers of darkness. These stories resonate and entertain each new generation.

However, the more I pondered on you are, what you do, when it counts, it seemed to me to be misleading. It is implying that we only have to show up and do great things when we spot a big moment, and the rest of the time we don’t have to try. The thing is, each moment in life has the potential to be a big moment. It just might not seem that way, especially if we have a specific expectation of how a big moment in life should look. And since we are embodied, which means we perceive the world through our previous experiences, a big moment to us might not be a big moment to someone else. And vice versa. We could miss doing the great things when it counts, because we weren’t paying attention. Shouldn’t it be you are, what you do, all the time?

Spiritual teacher, Marianne Williamson says in A Return to Love , that for many years, she was waiting to be discovered, like 50s film star Lana Turner who was discovered at a drugstore. Williamson says that she was waiting for her life to begin, and that it would only have meaning if it was in the limelight. And then, she realised that she had to give herself permission to be herself and become the star of her own life and live in her own light.

I asked my husband if he was the star in his own life. He said that no he wasn’t, he only has a walk-on part. We both laughed, because it seemed to be true. In reality, my husband is a hero who heeded a call to action. He gave up a kidney and work, to do dialysis in order to save our daughter’s life. And then, he went back to work and nursed me through cancer. It wasn’t glamorous. It was exhausting, and like all epics, the outcome seemed sometimes to balance on a knife’s edge, but he didn’t give up. He battled the monsters of critical and chronic illness and the dark side – those horrific thoughts that can terrorise us during uncertain times. And he did it without complaint. Afterwards, there was no accolades, no awards ceremonies or anything else that normally make people feel acknowledged and validated, the way people believe that being famous would make them feel.

Civil Rights Leader, Martin Luther King once said: Not everybody can be famous. But everybody can be great, because greatness is determined by service.

My husband is truly great. It just wasn’t the story he would have chosen to star in, which is what happens to our heros in the hero’s quest. But star in it my husband did. He behaved heroically and served over and above any call of duty, even though he didn’t always want to. He still says to this day: The glamour never starts.

Service comes in all forms, like in the everyday kindnesses you can perform when you are present and not waiting to shine and be congratulated. The kindnesses that make a difference to someone else’s life and ultimately to yours. For the hero’s quest is the very description of life itself, in life coach Martha Beck’s words: Life is one damn thing after another. We can never know if these damn things are big moments or small ones in our lives or the lives of others. But if we show up for them, then either way we are doing what counts, and we are making meaningful connections with others. Often making connections with others, showing our weaknesses, and worrying if we are enough, takes enormous amounts of courage.

Professor of Sociology, Brene Brown, says that it is only by daring greatly and being vulnerable and showing our weaknesses, that we can live life in a whole hearted way. She says that vulnerability may make us feel ashamed and afraid, but it is the birthplace of creativity and love and all the good things that give our lives meaning and make us feel rich and happy.

And that is ultimately what we are all searching for: the meaning of life, and being rich and happy, which is what happens to every hero at the end of an epic adventure.

Death and life are in the power of the tongue: and they that love it shall eat the fruit thereof, Proverbs 18:21, KJV.

Recently, in the Guardian, David Lodge was rereading Anthony Trollope’s last novel The Fixed Period. The story takes place on the fictional island of Britannula, where its Assembly wish to make euthanasia compulsory for everybody over the age of 67. After some debate the age is fixed at 67½. The idea is that the oldies can prepare for death, be feted and celebrated, and go out with great dignity amongst all their creature comforts.

Lodge tells us that the novel was badly received because it was so unlike the rest of Trollope’s work but reflected what was on the 66-year-old Trollope’s mind as he wrote it. Lodge quotes from Trollope’s letters to show us that Trollope meant every word: He felt that he would rather die than be old. He did not fear death, rather he feared being incapacitated and helpless.

Both his fear and his wish came true. In November 1882, Trollope suffered a severe stroke and was paralysed and unable to speak, before dying early December 1882, aged 67½.

Trollope, was a master storyteller. His oeuvre, his life, and his death demonstrate the power of fiction and the power of the stories we tell ourselves. We make our world with our stories, for good and for bad because we are human and embodied. That is, we experience the world through our bodies and their limited senses and then our brain interprets the experience in light of our past experiences. We pattern match, so we view a new experience as a similar bad or good one that we have previously experienced, and then we behave in such a way that makes this new experience fit the good or bad ones that went before it. So, we predict the outcome and make that outcome true and add it to our list of experiences. Ultimately, all we have are our thoughts and experiences, and the stories we tell ourselves. And we tell ourselves stories every minute of everyday often whilst not paying attention to the reality of what is really happening.

Some people cast themselves as victims in the story of their lives. They dwell on past sadnesses which feed into future interpretations of stories of defeat and further sadness. Life Coach, Martha Beck calls this approach to life story fondling. People get out their sad stories and fondle them and polish them instead of letting go and letting them fade with time. Beck recommends that we reeducate ourselves and choose narrative therapy, an approach where we learn to reframe our stories in different ways.
Some people can do this already and seem to be extremely lucky people who lead charmed lives. Beck believes that we can all learn to cast ourselves as heroes so that we can rewire our brains to interpret future events more positively and to lead our own charmed lives.

Sounds great! But it is extremely difficult to do. Yogis spend their whole lives meditating in order to wipe the lense of perception clean in order to see things as they really are, and not how we think they are. The idea behind seeing reality as it is rather than what story we tell in our heads, is that if we see things as they are, rather than what we think they are, life is generally better. But how is that possible? Terrible things occur everyday in daily life, disasters befall us, atrocities are committed to us, true. But often, we can make a drama many times worse by saying it shouldn’t have happened and then compounding the difficulty of the situation by acting under pressure and creating yet more difficulties. And sometimes small dramas seem as bad as the enormous ones because we live them differently in our heads to the reality of what has happened. As Sophocles put it: The greatest grieves are those we cause ourselves.

Spiritual Teacher Iyanla Vanzant talks about how we terrorise ourselves with our stories often about things that do not happen. We cause ourselves pain. Or, we miss out on life because we are believing a story that simply isn’t true. In Tapping the Power Within Vanzant demonstrates this by telling a story of how she never ate okra. She told everyone that she didn’t eat it, she hated it, until one day her neighbour cooked her some and brought it round and it was so delicious. Vanzant had been missing out on this lovely vegetable her whole life, because she had copied someone else’s I hate okra story and took it as her own. How much more had she missed out on because she believed that the good stuff wasn’t relevant to her? She goes on to say that we need to get ourselves better stories and question the ones we have right now, instead of just taking on other peoples’ stories with their habits and learnt helplessnesses.

Spiritual Teacher Byron Katie says similar things in her book Loving what is, and gives us a process to free ourselves of our terrible stories and learn to tell ourselves new stories based in reality. She says that it is not reality which is the problem, it is our thinking. Like Vanzant, Katie says we terrorise ourselves in our heads, instead of seeing what is, we interpret and attach all sorts of pain to things that might or might not be happening. Each time something causes you pain ask: 1) Is it true? 2) Can I absolutely know it’s true? 3) What happens when I think that thought? 4) Who would I be without that thought?

The results are surprisingly liberating. You can stop the thoughts, stop the stories, and observe without emotion what really is happening. Then, instead of the negative thoughts in the negative stories which can destroy your whole day, your whole life, you can create a space and in it, there is peace. Katie firmly believes if we all question our stories and base ourselves in reality, we can become more peaceful and then in turn the world becomes a peaceful place. As Mahatma Gandhi said, Be the change you want to see in the world.

And that is a great story to tell yourself:

Today, I put on my superhero hotpants and changed the world.

A book is one-to one experience. A secret you share. And when you close the book it leaves an opening in you – Jeanette Winterson

When I was a teenager in English Class at school, I remember hearing a short story about a family at night: The kids have gone to bed, the mum is tidying round, the dad is drying the dishes. Mum then goes to check on the children. When she comes back, she says:

‘Are you sure they don’t know anything?’

Dad hangs up his tea towel, puts his arms around her and says:

‘Yes. I am sure.’

They turn off the lights and go to bed, knowing that the world will end that night.

At the end of the reading, the teacher said, ‘Now, it’s your turn, what would you do if the world was going to end tonight?’

A classroom full of teenagers’ responses, strangely enough, I don’t remember, but the story I do. So much so that 20 or so years on, often when I am in kitchen loading the dishwasher or putting dishes away, I think about that story. And I also remember that era, when the threat of nuclear war and the end of the world seemed to be a real possibility.

Recently, in a review in the TLS, Martha Naussbaum says the English novel was a social protest movement from its inception, written specifically to creating feeling amongst the wealthier classes. She cites Dickens, Hardy, Trollope, and the empathy-altruism hypothesis – the work of social psychologist C. Daniel Batson – which demonstrates that specific ways of storytelling can motivate people to help those in need in a way that facts and figures cannot.

There are so many examples of powerful storytelling. Sitting here, I think of Toni Morrison’s description of the tree-shaped scars on the back of Sethe, the runaway slave who murders her children rather than have them be enslaved and whipped (Beloved). I think of concentration camp inmate Victor Frankl’s non-fiction account of how he was told to rub his cheeks each morning so that he would look healthy enough to work and avoid being sent to the gas chambers that day (Man’s Search for Meaning). I read both books just once, yet the stories they contain will remain with me forever. They changed my perception of the world and my historical understanding of the times and places in which these stories were set.

Fictional journalism or creative non-fiction, is a field of writing which has developed from factual reporting to a more subjective slant precisely because it recognises the power of storytelling and the power to influence readers’ opinion. So much so, that according to Wikipedia, Joan Didion, the famous new fiction writer believes, that the media tells us how to live and that journalists must be closely observed because of the power they wield. In the same way, storytelling is often used in advertising to create an emotional reaction in potential customers, and we believe these stories: We will be sexier, happier, healthier if we buy that new car, or that big chocolate ice-cream. Stories can be incredibly influential and not always in a good way.

Fictional fact-presentation such as case studies or descriptions of individuals in medical journals can be powerful in a good way. Ones I have read about chronic renal failure, were presented alongside facts and figures, and in a sidebar described how someone born without working kidneys could grow through dialysis onto transplant and into ‘normal’ life.

The same goes for the breast cancer literature I have read. Individual stories of women and men from diagnosis through treatment were highlighted throughout the pamphlets and presented a pattern of how to manage and what to expect. They were like signposts indicating the way through a journey.

Mythologist Joseph Campbell said in life, often we are not searching for the meaning of life necessarily, but for the experience of being alive and how to understand it. As in the medical literature, stories can be our guide. They can explain things to us, things that we might know subconsciously, but which we only really appreciate once we have read them in stories or myths. Stories highlight patterns which we can follow like landmarks on the horizon and enable us to make our way to a more satisfactory life.

Other times, stories can inspire us to be truly great. Campbell encapsulates this theory in his best known quotation Follow your bliss. He says that we are capable of knowing and experiencing rapture and bliss but sometimes we just don’t know how. Stories, again can be our guiding star and they enable us to realise our potential, gain wisdom, or live fuller and better lives.

Sometimes stories tap deep into our psyche and give us the answers to questions we didn’t even know we were asking.

The key though, is to find the right story, the stories which resonate with us, the ones which change us, and the ones which make us want to change the world. Otherwise, as Campbell once joked, we might end up just following our blisters.

One month ago I, who has had cancer, dropped my daughter, who has had kidney failure, off at school for her first day. And as I walked home, I was stunned. This day was in a future I didn’t believe could happen and which I had never allowed myself to think about.

I felt completely lost.

So there we were, at the gate. My daughter was completely cool about this new experience and walked into her new life, full of joy, without a backward glance.

I was less cool.

And this feeling of being lost reminded me of the questions I would ask when designing webpages: Where am I? Where have I been? Where am I going?

And when the answers weren’t immediately apparent, I would slap on breadcrumbs, menus, sidebars, search boxes and anything else I could, to make sure users knew where to go next.

Now as I type this, it sounds like I was designing a tunnel. I didn’t think about user experience. I was just herding them through, and literally pushing them to the exit.

And for a very long time, I used the same approach in life. I herded myself through a set of goals in the hope of reaching some imagined future. In it, I would be cool and everything would be fabulous.

What can I say? I was a computer programmer. I provided programmed solutions and users stepped through them in a specific way to get specific results. And then times changed. I moved off the mainframe and onto the web but I continued with the same approach. And I wasn’t alone.

In a recent blog post, Alan Dix discusses how being lost in hyperspace, was a common preoccupation in the human-computer interaction world. But lately, having looked at how users are behaving, especially on sites like Pinterest, Alan says perhaps they are not worried about feeling lost, or having control anymore. They are just enjoying the experience.

I had a similar discovery too when I was thinking about sprucing up this website. I wandered round the web to see what was new and was looking at Jeffrey Zeldman’s site when I saw that his breadcrumbs, sidebars, and search boxes have disappeared. I was baffled at first, without signage how would I navigate? What if I got lost? But on reflection, I realised, I didn’t need signage, I was there for a mosey round and an experience. How could I get lost?

And as I admired Zeldman’s clean design and crisp pictures, I was reminded of my la pavoni. It doesn’t have much in the way of instructions on it, but it is so asethetically pleasing that when I use it, I am not just making coffee, I am temporarily transported to coffee nirvana. And how could I ever get lost in nirvana?

I still believe that design is about communication and communicating intentions. But now I know this includes more than results. Good design must mean amongst other things, a collective sharing of ideas and good experiences, which is now easier to achieve, because we have a whole generation of users who have never known the web any other way. Users who demonstrate the no function in structure principle, because they don’t worry about getting lost. They turn up without any expectations of how something should work and are happy to experience a site without needing the interaction to happen in a specific sequence.

And after my recent life experiences where I had no control over what was going on or any clear instructions on how to proceed, I have learnt an important lesson. Being present is enough. An experience doesn’t have to be prescribed. It doesn’t need sign posting. It is not about knowing exactly where you are, where you’ve been, or where you are going. It is about right now.

The current experience is all we have, so we need to make it good. And on the days when being without signage brings me out in a rash, I remember my daughter on her first day of school, embracing life with joy, and I try to do the same. And when I do that, I become the person I always wanted to be in some imagined future:

I am cool and everything is fabulous.

Before I started chemotherapy in March 2011 I had had the same hairdo for 20 years. It was long and very dark brown and curly and I loved it. It was, I believed, my crowning glory and I imagined I wouldn’t be the same without it. I found that I was the same without it. I am not my hair but I like having hair on my head.

When my hair started falling out it was shocking to hold great big long clumps in my hands, so my husband clipped it all off and then I looked on the internet for a gallery of pictures to show me how soon my hair would grow back and what it would look like. I thought that way I would feel less sad. At the time, I couldn’t find one so I thought that one day I would put up my own for someone who wanted the same information. So, today is that day.

The pictures are a bit random because I found chemotherapy to be pretty gruelling, so the photographs are not all taken at a specific time of the month in the same place in the same outfit as I would have liked. They were taken all over the place and sometimes there is one month between them and other times six weeks. I took pictures whenever I looked in the mirror and said, ‘Oooh new hair do,’ which happened a lot more than I had thought it would.

I had six rounds of chemotherapy, every three weeks between March and August 2011. My hair started falling out after the first round and I was completely bald by the third round. It started growing back after the fifth round and three weeks after the last round it was fuzzy, grey and thick and thin along its length. Three weeks after I finished chemotherapy I got my husband to shave my head again so it would be even. And my hair has been growing fairly steadily since then.

I had one haircut in April 2012 (see March 2012 before and April 2012 the haircut) as it was a bit of an odd shape and then in September 2012 I got my husband to trim the back off with the kitchen scissors to turn it into a bob, rather than the mullet it felt like.

My new hair was completely grey so I coloured it my old colour. I didn’t want grey hair. I wanted to look in the mirror and see a me I recognised. I used a ‘natural’ hair dye one without ammonia in case my scalp was sensitive.

Last spring I began six rounds of chemotherapy which changed the relationship between me and my body forever. The chemo worked so well on the first round, it shut down my immune system and put me in hospital. Then each subsequent round left me weaker and weaker. For a few months, I became my body.

I spent everyday trying to battle the physical side effects of the chemo. And the intellectual part of me which I thought defined me, behaved like a useless relative asking the questions I didn’t want to hear: ‘Aren’t you scared?, ‘What if you don’t get better?’. Finally, I stopped thinking and did what my body asked me: ‘Sip this, chew that, lie down’. I lived from moment to moment and began living completely in the present, I had stumbled upon mindfulness.

One afternoon as I pushed a needle full of the immunostimulator Lenograstim subcutaneously into my stomach, I remembered Stelarc, an artist who upgrades himself surgically because he believes his body is obsolete. And I thought: ‘What a plonka,’ as I was still very sore from having cancer surgically removed from my body. But on reflection, I could see what he meant. I was only my body and so weak I was unable to interact with the world. Someone else was looking after my toddlers, taking them to the park, and doing all the things I could no longer do. I was trapped in my body upstairs on the bed, and I would weep at the thought of getting up to do anything, even reading was beyond me. I too felt that my body needed an upgrade.

I felt that every experience I had was totally physical and raw. Although on an intellectual level I still knew that was not true. We are embodied. We experience the world through our bodies and their limited senses and then our brain interprets the experience in light of our past experiences. There is no such thing as a raw experience.

I even lived this embodiment. Each time I thought of the next round of chemotherapy, I would vomit. Such a reaction is known as anticipatory nausea. And, anything I did in the chemotherapy room: drinking tea and reading my kindle, I was unable to do outside of it without vomiting. My embodiment had reinterpreted the experiences of drinking tea and reading my kindle as vomit-inducing ones.

I realised that it wasn’t just my embodiment which was causing my experiences. It was also other peoples’ embodiment, especially when it came to their perception of my physical appearance. I lost all of my body hair and so when I left the house it was in camouflage. I wore an expensive wig, I drew on my eyebrows and I wore a lot of eye-makeup to distract attention from my missing eyelashes, so people wouldn’t perceive me as sick. On the odd occasion when I would open the front door displaying my bald head and face, people would shrink backwards and look at me with horror or repulsion or fear. In my camouflage, people would treat me as a normal person and judge me on the tube for not giving up my seat to the needy. And the people who knew would say: ‘Oh you look so well, I can’t believe you had cancer.’ Everyone has an experience, or an image of how cancer should look.

Throughout it all, I kept my Matrix residual self image, the image of me which had been the same for over 20 years: Long black curly hair and a fine pair of eyebrows. So, I would get a shock when I saw my bald self in the mirror looking back horrified and repulsed even though I no longer felt my hair on my shoulders after I had asked my husband to cut it. I packed it and posted it myself to a wig charity. My hair had left the building. However, we didn’t have any mirrors in our home in which I could easily catch sight of myself, so I would go days thinking that I was still the same old me. Even when my husband said I looked like a Mekon, I laughed and thought, ‘Well that is just your opinion.’ In my head I was beautiful. I was a warrior. I was Wonderwoman. I had learnt how to reframe my experiences and tell myself positive stories. I had learnt to use narrative therapy.

And because I was focusing on reinterpreting things more positively, I stopped reading into situations. I have always been a people-pleaser, afraid that people won’t like me, or that I am not enough. Intellectually, I know that this is because my embodied mind is working overtime misintepreting other people’s behaviour. Most people aren’t actively disliking me, they are busy thinking about their underpants being too tight or what they are having for tea. They haven’t even noticed me. Sadly, I find a lot of women feel the way I do, it seems to be some warped extension of the mothering instinct. I have a feeling that I am responsible for making everyone happy and should rush about doing just that. As if I had the power?

Several months after finishing chemo, I went to a yoga class. I thought I would only do about 10 minutes and have to rest, but I managed to do the whole thing. It felt amazing. I was there and present and so proud of my body for being able to do yoga, to get into positions and to hold them. I was all of me, complete in my body. I was unaware of anything else until I looked up and saw a woman at the back of the room staring at me. Throughout the rest of the class she kept staring. Why wouldn’t she though? I was beautiful. I was a warrior. I was Wonderwoman. And then when we went over to return the blocks and belts, she told me off for standing on someone else’s yoga mat. It was immediate, she leant across and got hold of me the instant I stepped on it as if she had been waiting for me. I immediately apologised being the people-pleasing sap I am and stepped out of her grip, and then I lay down on my mat for the corpse pose and felt angry: It was a communal mat and I was barefoot and really, WTF? I decided I would talk to her later and got on with relaxing. When I got up I had forgotten what she looked like. How was that possible? And as I walked home I asked myself: What did it matter? Why did I need to say something? In this instance, her behaviour towards me was not my problem. It was sad that instead of using this time to do yoga and feel better, she was for whatever reason, annoyed with me.

And this was a revelation. I grew up in a household where sometimes I would be recounting an incident and then I would get told off because I didn’t respond correctly. I should have said X, or shouted, or shown them. Or, I would get told off because someone would be upset about something else and not about me at all. I just happened to be there able to become a focal point for their annoyances. And this has recurred in different contexts in my life, particularly in my career, which has made me feel bad because somewhere along the line, my embodiment believed that someone else’s inappropriate behaviour was my fault and that I should bend myself out of shape to fix it and make them feel better so that they won’t treat me badly again.

So like the embodied kindle-tea vomiting that I learnt instantly, recognising that a woman telling me off was about her and not about me, was amazing. And it was fitting that this happened in yoga class. Yogis talk about cleaning the lense of perception and see the world as it really is. Through meditation, Yogis attain a healthy state of seeing things as they are rather than the unhealthy stories their embodied selves have learnt to believe. And once this ability to see clearly is combined with the mindfulness of being present in this moment of seeing, great power and wisdom become the norm.

When my hair and eyebrows first grew back they were white, so I dyed them and afterwards I looked in the mirror and felt a distinct sense of: ‘Ah there you are.’ The image in the mirror once more resembled the image in my head, although I had a funky short hairdo and looked like a different me but more me.

And having spent time listening to my body and practising mindfulness, some days I still feel like more me, albeit, a different, funky me. And other days I forget about me and where I have been as I am sucked back into life and the trifles which can make up a day. And every now and again, I remember where I am, and I remember that I am all of me, complete in my body, and once again I recognise that I am more me than I ever was and I welcome that distinct sense of: ‘Ah there you are.’ And why wouldn’t I?

I am beautiful. I am a warrior. I am Wonderwoman.

In 2002, I watched Stelarc at the CHI 2002 conference in Minneapolis, give his keynote speech entitled The body is obsolete.

We used to talk a lot about obsolete software. Nowadays we mostly talk about giving software an upgrade. In the same way, Stelarc is not saying that the body is no longer needed, as that would imply that he believes the body is separate from the mind, as Decartes and his theory of Cartesian Dualism postulates. Instead, Stelarc is saying that the human body needs a redesign to keep up with the mind.

By redesigning his physiology, Stelarc feels that he can extend his philosophy of life because in this technological age, we are overwhelmed with information and we cannot creatively process it. Thus, we need a more creative attitude to the body. Instead of designing ergonomic systems which adapt to the body, why not redesign the body so that it can be more easily plugged into technological advances?

Over the years Stelarc, a performance artist, has experimented with his own body to extend himself. In 2007 he had an ear with a microphone inside attached to his arm, with the aim of connecting it to the internet, so that people could hear what his ear is hearing.

Sterlac is not alone. Computer scientist Kevin Warwick wants to upgrade humans too. In 2002 he had a chip inserted into his left arm’s nerve fibres, which enabled him to control a wheelchair and an artificial hand. The chip also received signals and could stimulate/simulate artificial (meaningful?) sensations in his arm from the signals. I listened to Warwick present his research at Westminster University in 2005. He wanted to take this work further and ‘jack into the nervous system’ in order to override the restrictions of our bodies.

However, humans are constantly bombarded by signals to their senses and have limits on what they are able to interpret at any given time. Because of these limitations, we augment our cognitive capabilities by employing and interacting with the environment around us. We use calendars and write lists so we can use such information when we need it, instead of taking the time to memorise it and store it in our heads. And the information which makes it past the filters of our senses and into our brain is done so in such a way because of our past experiences, which in turn impacts the interpretation of our future experiences.

This interpretative experience of the world is known as embodiment or situatedness (otherwise known as social situatedness). We understand and process knowledge which is situated in social, cultural and physical contexts. We give meaning to the knowledge because of where we are, doing what we do, in a specific moment of time.

So, if you are going to override your embodied nature – or your limitations – by jacking into your nervous system or hearing extra streams of information, you are going to have some new experiences. Your body might learn to adapt, as we humans are adaptable creatures. Alternatively you might have a meltdown.

Alvin Toffler in his book Future Shock popularised the term ‘Information overload’ which describes the difficulties humans can have understanding and making decisions when presented with too much information.

So, the questions that spring to mind when you upgrade your embodiment:

• Is the information meaningful?
• Is it protected? Safe and secure?
• Is it enriching? Has it a purpose?
• Can you wear this technology or perhaps pop it down your underpants instead of having surgery?

Steve Mann augments his reality with wearable computing. Mann wears sunglasses which display constantly streaming information based on what he is seeing. This information assists his memory and enriches his world view because it is situated. It comes with a context and is meaningful to him in that moment and if his technology stops working he can take it off his nose, sit down at his desk and fix it.

In contrast, Mark Gasson deliberately infected his chip implant with a computer virus in order to experiment with the security risks of implantable technology. His implant stopped working but he is leaving it in his arm. He says the experiment was motivated by more and more people getting chip implants.

Many people have surgery for cosmetic reasons, so it should not come as a surprise that people would voluntarily choose unnecessary surgery to augment their healthy bodies with technological implants. However, Stelarc has said that he is constantly redesigning his own body because it is difficult to find people who want to undergo surgery. No surprise there when he lists the various setbacks he has experienced such as infection and necrosis.

Controlling a wheelchair with your mind when your limbs no longer work and an extra ear on your arm transmitting whatever someone is saying when they are standing next to you, are two applications of implantable technology. Both the artist and the scientist are motivated by the desire to upgrade the embodied nature of the human condition because they feel that the human body is insufficient in today’s technological society.

Ironically, robotics researcher Rodney Brooks among others argues that true artificial intelligence can only be achieved by machines that have sensory and motor skills. Robots and machines need bodies. Thus, they need to be embodied and situated to have a context and constraints within which they can successfully interact with the world.

So, as humans aspire to override the very aspects of the body which make them human, robotics research is replicating these human limitations in order to successfully create functioning artificial beings.

We live in interesting times.

I used to read a woman’s blog, everyday. It was amazing: Her drunken, violent mother, her complicated pregnancy, her terrible having a baby experience followed by terrible post-natal depression. It was a detailed slice of life which was compelling to read. One day she wrote that her husband was thinking of resigning from his job to go to another job for money even though his boss had been great to him and it was a bit of a dilemma and what was he to do? Next day, the blog had gone forever, all that was left was an apology for saying too much.

I can only guess that the last entry, before the blog got deleted, jeopardised her husband’s livelihood and it was the kind of the thing she might not have mentioned to any of husband’s work colleagues had she seen them face-to-face.

I remember when I was eight-years-old being with my mother as a woman we had bumped into in the street told us all about about a recent suicide attempt – she took a lot of tablets. At the end of the long, sad story she looked at me as she said,

‘And I lay on the bed and wished that I would never wake up.’

I am probably the same age now as that woman was back then and I wonder would this woman be blogging nowadays? Lots of people do blog about their feelings. Is there any difference between blogging and telling people in the street?

Blogging about something and publishing it online means that you don’t know who you are telling although you have an exact record of what you have said. Telling someone in the street face-to-face means you know whom you have told but you might not remember exactly what you said.

Whether you are saying too much depends on how comfortable you feel sharing whatever you have to say and your state of mind. If you are traumatised the filters that you normally have to stop everything you are thinking come straight out of your mouth, are not always working and sometimes that is not the best time to be talking, especially in front of eight-year olds, even though you have a need.

Talking or blogging can be cathartic and just the thing to make sense of an event. Or, you can, as in the case of the husband-job blogger-woman, say too much and later be sorry because you set into motion events you wish hadn’t happened.

It is easier to be free with your information when there is just you and a computer and no one else. There is a certain fake intimacy of ‘me, you (the computer), and the four walls’. The X million people also on their computers who might read what you are writing, are forgotten about.

When interacting with another person we often tailor what we say depending on what they say. Or, we get prevented from saying what we want to say because this other person has something to say. Or, someone else comes along and we don’t feel comfortable having the same discussion in front of them. On a computer there is no one there to stop you saying exactly what you want to say, exactly how you want to say it. Liberating or dangerous?

It is quite common to read about people being sacked nowadays because they have blogged about their lives and the company they work for feels that its reputation is somehow compromised. This is interesting because people often talk about how they feel about their job when in the workplace. But because they are talking to a limited audience in the canteen or at the coffee machine it doesn’t carry as much weight as if their opinion is all typed up and put online where you have an audience potentially in the millions. The power of the written word does seem to be greater than the spoken one.

Incidently, I have, in recent years, asked my mother about the woman we met in the street and she doesn’t remember it at all. Perhaps, back then she was forever meeting women who wanted to top themselves. Perhaps, she chose discretion. She chose not to remember in case the woman in question didn’t want anyone to remember and be reminded of a difficult time years later. Or perhaps, we said goodbye to this woman and got on the bus to go home and what to have for tea become the most important thing to us.

And perhaps it is the same when reading blogs. We switch off the computer and go back to our lives and we forget a lot of what we have read and eventually these blogs are deleted by their owners and whatever seemed so important then isn’t so, because life is ever changing. Or, since we are all human, and the human condition doesn’t change, perhaps you can’t share too much. Perhaps, sharing our experiences and connecting to others for good or for bad is all we have, whether we do it online or in person.

I am in the market for a new mobile phone. I love my current LG running android but it is a bit battered and after a little family member chewed the buttons it doesn’t work as well, and the camera is very slow. So, I was given a copy of Stuff Magazine The Android Issue and having looked at it for the first time today I am enraged. I am furious.

What has the girl on the cover got to do with anything in this magazine? Turning the pages there is more of her and another girl in progressively silly poses. They are not even interacting with the technology, they are just looking about with a vacant expression only ever seen in porn magazines for men. Android doesn’t need porn style poses to promote its wares. I think my alternative version of this cover is better. Same plastic dollie bird except Barbie has more clothes on and looks pleased with her ipad.

The Stuff magazine cover and its Android article appalls me. The message I guess this cover is aiming for is: Android is ‘sexy’. The message I receive is that this magazine is aimed at and edited by sad porn loving men who like to fumble furtively with their Android apps and believe any sort of technology is a man’s domain. Disturbing to say the very least in 2011. The Internet has opened up the world in so many ways and technology is moving on constantly to make things better and more exciting. But sadly, marketing ‘sexy’ is used to sell more than ever and we are bombarded by unnecessary pictures of scantily clad vacant women.

Come on, you might say, it’s only a bit of fun. It isn’t. It truly isn’t. I am a mother of young girls and a computer scientist. I want to share with them the excitment of a world improved by technology. Cool, accessible technology which makes life easier. I won’t be using Stuff magazine to do that because I don’t want to have to come up with an explanation of what the silly girls are doing in the pictures. Imagine it:

Daughter: What is that girl doing mummy?
Me: Well she certainly doesn’t need to use that stylus when checking the weather app, she hasn’t got to grips with the multi-touch functionality on that HTC phone and she really must pay more attention to what she is doing…

Give me break! Already my eldest has used the term ‘boy’s toys’ and I can tell you that it is not a term she learnt from me.

We don’t need to sex up our technology, especially not to promote Android. Come on Stuff magazine, have some respect for your demographic and stop treating them like porn mad losers.

Newsflash: women do technology. The first computer programmer was a woman.

Today I updated WordPress. Wow! I have blogged in the past about how much I love WordPress, but where have I been? The WordPress community have been busy making everything smart and sexy. The new dashboard and themes make me desperate to write cool blogs (Dream on – I will).

Before my discovery today, I was a little upset to change my Kubrick theme, I read somewhere that it is no longer supported but after I installed my upgrade it worked as beautifully as ever. However, as much as I love its calm blue smartness, I have always secretly hankered for something more without ever wanting to commit to doing anything. Apart from the ‘if it ‘ain’t broke don’t fix it’ adage, scripting is a means to an end with me. If I really need to do something in a scripting language, I hack away blindly and never get it right the first few goes. Sometimes catastrophically.

When I was an industrial placement student, I edited a whole live database system under the tuition of the resident systems security ‘expert’ (who was one creepy guy). I guess he would have told me not to do that but I was 20 years old and didn’t have a very long attention span. Seriously, who does at that age? Anyway, one embarrassing mess later I was highly amused to find out that he hadn’t a single backup of the database in his Hong Kong Book of Kung Fu tricks . It just goes to show you that everyone needs to think carefully about who is going to carry out the essential but boring jobs (university departmental intranets are a total case in point). And if you must also bore your poor students whilst instructing them, make sure you practice what you preach, and it is probably best to get it down in an email so they have clear instructions.

Apart from my hacktastic tendencies, the other reason I hesitated about tinkering with the Kubrick theme was that I liked its simplicity and its clear lines and from a usability point of view, it is easy to read and to process (Where am I? Where have I been? Where am I going?). I have chosen a similar layout on this one and it looks great, but reading it I tire more easily because the text is too wide and hence, more tiring to read. I need a smaller text column. I feel more tinkering coming on.

Luckily that will be easy to do as I have used the child theme approach (great tutorial here : http://www.throwingabrick.com/wordpress/customizing-the-wordpress-twenty-ten-theme.html ). The child theme approach to editing themes is perfect. It lets me overload my code changes in a separate directory without ever messing up the real theme’s code. Fantastic. And then, when tired of scripting, I can use the Appearance Editor in the Dashboard to change colours and had a tinker about. The sidebar is taken care of by the Widgets drag and drop. This mixture of a bit of typing and mouse manipulation is exactly me. I love it. I want to start thinking of cool things to say, up my game, have cool blogs, but I might just have to fiddle with this new theme a bit more first.