I BLOG - I EXIST

I am eager to share what I found today. I started my working day in the office with a cup of coffee... with Michael Chorost. He is the person of my Monday today.

I ran across the website of Professor Chorost by pure accident. As some of you might know, I am compiling the syllabus for my class "Presidential Elections and American Culture: News Media, New Media and American Politics," which I start teaching this April. So, I am in constant search of the talanted people out there who have experience in teaching the new media courses. Professor Chorost sounds to be an impressive Professor and Personality. You should check out his website.

Quoted from Chorost's Webpage:

Dr. Michael Chorost (pronounced “kor-ist”) was born with a severe hearing loss due to an epidemic of rubella. He didn’t learn to talk until he got hearing aids at age 3½. Those enabled him to grow up speaking English more or less normally, and he got a B.A. in English from Brown and a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin.

In 1999 he moved from Austin to San Francisco for a dot-com job, and then moved to another job at SRI International in Menlo Park, California. On July 7, 2001, he lost the remaining hearing in his one usable ear and got a cochlear implant shortly afterward. This experience was chronicled in his book, Rebuilt: How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human (Houghton Mifflin, 2005).

In July 2008, he contracted with The Free Press (Simon & Schuster) to write his second book, “World Wide Mind: The Coming Integration of Humans and Machines.”

For the 2008-2009 school year, he is a visiting professor at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C.

He has a cat named Elvis. His website is http://www.michaelchorost.com.

First of all, Professor Chorost has a sleek cat. I saw the pictures. And I am deeply inclined to think that men who take good care of their cats --- must be good personalities. Beware of the people who say they hate cats! It's equal to saying: I hate women!

Secondly, Professor Chorost has an impressive bio! His story is inspiring. In his bioblurb (I suppose) he wrote:

"Michael Chorost became a cyborg on October 1, 2001, the day his new ear was booted up. Born hard of hearing in 1964, he went completely deaf in his thirties. Rather than live in silence, he chose to have a computer surgically embedded in his skull to artificially restore his hearing.

This is the story of Chorost’s journey – from deafness to hearing, from human to cyborg –and how it transformed him. The melding of silicon and flesh has long been the stuff of science fiction. But as Chorost reveals in this witty, poignant, and illuminating memoir, fantasy is now giving way to reality.

Chorost found his new body mystifyingly mechanical: Kitchen magnets stuck to his head. He could plug himself directly into a CD player. His hearing was routinely upgraded with new software.

All of which forced him to confront complex questions about humans in the machine age: When the senses become programmable, can we trust what they tell us about the world? Will cochlear implants destroy the signing deaf community? And above all, are cyborgs still human?"

I never read the book, but one can downloaded the .pdf version of the first chapter from his website. The chapter starts with the emotional turmoil: both hearing aids fail on Chorost at once, and the drama of a small human being unfolds --- he loses hearing, and the world drastically changes. He becomes a cyborg.

Sounds like a novel. It's not.

A fascinating story to start another Monday in February 2009.