A Feeling for Information: Technological Potentiality and Embodied Futures in Post-Socialist China
Update: 2025-09-23
Description
This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Yue Zhao can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/09/a-feeling-for-information-technological-potentiality-and-embodied-futures-in-post-socialist-china/. About the post: Medical anthropologists and STS scholars have examined the epistemic roles of biomedical practices in creating future-oriented narratives of life’s “potentiality” — visions of life that could and should be (Taussig et al., 2013). This post offers a historical glimpse into how information technologies—and the sociopolitical anticipation of their potential impacts—produced embodied forms of futurity in the context of reform-era China, shaping intellectual and popular practices around humans’ bodily sensory and cognitive capacities as sites of optimization and enhancement. I highlight two case studies in which historical actors in 1980s China imagined human bodies as information storage, sensors, and transmitters. In doing so, this post asks what it means to feel, sense, and be with information as the boundaries between nature and culture, the biological and technological, human and machine
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