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By Mark Vardy
Brandi Field was walking to the UVic campus when she saw a sign advertising a garage sale. But where many of us would simply absorb the mundane and move on, Field turned her reflections on that sign into a master’s in English essay that won this year’s Lieutenant Governor’s Silver Medal.
The garage sale sign was printed from a computer. She thought how at one time, the sign would have been written by hand, enabling her to glean something about its author.
“It suddenly occurred to me I should look into the experiences of the subject as mediated through the computer,” she said from her home in Winnipeg.
That impetus, together with an abiding interest in science fiction and the philosophical material covered in seminar classes, led to her essay with the impressive, if somewhat overwhelming, title: “From Death to Democracy: Technospectral Potential in Gibson’s Cyberpunk and the Digital Humanities.”
“I just tell people I studied science fiction,” she says. Pressed a little further, Field reveals that she applied Jacque Derrida’s philosophy of ethical decision-making to William Gibson’s 1999 sci-fi novel All Tomorrow’s Parties.
For Derrida, ethical decisions are ultimately grounded in the certainty of one’s own mortality. Responsibility is born from the fact that nobody else can take your place at the moment of death. However, in Gibson’s novel, mortality is extended via technological means to infinity.
If cyberspace (a term that Gibson himself coined and popularized in the 1980s) allows us human beings to escape mortality through virtual reality, where is the grounding for Derrida’s concept of responsibility?
“With our lives being so entrenched in computers, we have to figure out what responsibility means,” Field says. “My whole paper was based on the fact that I think this is an open question—it’s not something you can conclude upon. Rather than habitually rely on taken-for-granted moral codes, we need ongoing democratic debate about the very grounds on which decisions are taken,” says Field.
Applying this way of thinking to her own life led to her decision to study law with the intent of improving social problems. Field won an entrance scholarship to the University of Manitoba’s law school, where she begins in September 2008.
“I receive four newspapers in a day, and I read them,” says Field. “And you know how you read and you get frustrated? Because you think, ‘We can do better.’ Maybe we can’t fix all the problems, but we can do a little better.”
“My MA formed a question for me that I’ll never finish asking and that I’ll never finish living out. That’s what I like about it, because I’m learning from something constantly. I’m not just putting it away; it’s going to affect everything I do.”
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