Donna Haraway’s Wired Magazine interview discusses the apparent ambiguity that has continued to surface between the ‘natural’ and the ‘artificial’ as a result of the inseparable relationship that has developed between people and technology. Today we have transcended the concept of being isolated from the world, and arrived at the notion that we, as individuals, are nodes in larger networks. This idea represents the cornerstone of the cyborg era. Haraway’s definition of a cyborg goes beyond the assumption of metal beneath the flesh. I am a cyborg, a biological-technological hybrid that works by interacting with and applying technological extensions of myself to enhance my efficiency. Moreover, while I am, on one hand, a node that lives within vast societal networks and functions by communicating through interactions with technology, I am, more importantly, a body composed of inter-related networks that require maintenance and reconditioning to function at my maximum capacity: I am a cyborg.
A classified cyborg is symbolic of a biological-technological hybrid that requires a physical interaction between people and technology as a means to enhance the potential to perform various tasks. Haraway suggests that “the cyborg age is here and now, everywhere there [is] a car or a phone or a VCR” (Kunzru 1). These technologies represent “extensions of
some human faculty— psychic or physical” (McLuhan 3). For instance, cars provide a transportation outlet that allows people to move from one location to another in a quick time span while pedestrians, who abstain from the use of transportation vehicles, must endure the time restraints of walking. While a car reduces the amount of time and space, walking enhances it and thus, the car symbolize...
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...echnology. I am a cyborg. Technology has consumed my life, but I am not its only victim, everyone is. People have become engulfed by the capability of technology to overpower and transcend the limits of human capacity, thereby allowing us to perform more advanced functions. This is the technological sublime and it only continues to intensify. I live in a world where a life without technology is almost impossible. Technology has become a natural part of me, and everyone else, where every activity performed incorporates some form of technological process. Essentially, the entire world epitomizes a massive yet intricate network, where billions of machines function to unify the whole system: we are all cyborgs.
Work Cited
Kunzru, Hari. "You are cyborg." Wired Magazine 5.2 (1997): 1-7.
Marshall, McLuhan. “The Medium is the Massage. An Inventory of Effects.” (1967)
Posthuman by Nicholas Gane is a comparison of thoughts from selected scholars on the subject of the increasingly complex relationship between mankind and technology and how these technologies are breaking down the barriers that make us human. He starts by introducing us to the history of the concept of the Posthuman, which started with the cybernetic movement of the 1940’s and most influentially the writings of Norbert Wiener. The real popularity of the subject has its roots with Donna Haraways concept of the cyborg. Her concept is a postive rendition of the idea of posthumanism, which focuses on cybernetic technology and genetic modification and how these technologies could radically change humanity. Gane then defines Posthuman as when the
Movies and literature alike have often served to villainize technology. These topics survive and persist, perhaps because we are morbidly fascinated with our own predicted downfall. Many people will admit to being concerned, as cummings is in "of all the blessings which to man," that the world will one day be run by machines. This potential future governing force is "without a heart" and "couldn't use a mind," and that may scare humans most of all (25, 28).
This conflict can be observed in the film Chappie. The idea that technology could reach a point where police officers could be replaced by machines is indicative of the idea of how humans’ behavior and actions can be affected by the technology accessible to them. In this case, the technology is changing human action by removing humans from harm’s way and replacing them with machines. The change in human action as a result of technology brings up the question of whether the new human action is necessarily an improvement. As was seen in the film, the new technologies brought forth the debate of the morality of using such advanced robots. The uncertainty of the merit or value of technology is present in many of the interactions with technology seen in the course. With the changes brought about by technology, there also exists a conservative sentiment that does not see such changes as necessary. This resistance to technology can be seen in Marx, with the push for a return to a pastoral life. One other instance of the way that technology has shaped human behavior is one of the examples presented in lecture. An article spoke of how a statue was being moved as a result of too many people bumping into it because they were texting while walking and thus distracted. This provides an example of
Andy Clark, in Natural-Born Cyborgs, offers an extended argument that technology’s impact on and intertwining with ordinary biological human life is not to be feared, either psychologically or morally. Clark offers several key concepts towards his line of reasoning. Clark argues that a human being thinks and reasons based on the biological brain and body dynamically linked with the culture and technological tools transparently accessible to the human. This form of thinking and reasoning develops new "thinking systems" that which over time become second nature thoughts and reasons and are the basis of even newer "thinking systems." It is a repetitive cycle that continues forever being built upon previous systems. Clark argues that humans are natural-born cyborgs based on the dynamic link, the constant two-way traffic between the biological processes of the human and the technological tools that aid the thinking process. Hence, these tools are apart of the thinking process, and therefore, the person. In essence, the human brain, as Clark keenly puts it, is an "incomplete cognitive system," (Clark, 189) and is only complete when both sides of the link are inextricably merged.
...or Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s.” In Coming to Terms: Feminism, Theory, Politics, edited by Elizabeth Weed, 173-204. London: Routledge, 1989.
We live within an era of great technological achievement. As new devices and forms of communication are developed, our society evolves along side. Technological determinists argue that technology is bringing us into a dystopia. Social constructionists, however, argue that we are entering a utopia of communication; a world full of connections regardless of distance and self. In addition, there are those that argue we will remain within our syntopian world, one with a virtual equilibrium between man and machine. Despite the perception of the world we are moving into, there are evident symbiotic relationships that we have with our devices and their applications: both good and bad. For the purposes of this paper however, we will dissect how our relationships with our devices affects sociology. Specifically, we will be identifying and explaining a term that has become known as absent presence.
When it comes to the topic of technological advances, most of us agree that they are beneficial to humans. Where this agreement usually ends, however, is on the question of whether or not Generation Z is at risk. Whereas, some are convinced that we have become cyborgs and are enslaved to devices that lie in our pockets. Others however, maintain that it can be both beneficial and detrimental. In “We Are All Cyborgs Now,” Amber Case argues that, although there are challenges with online socialization, being able to connect online helps to humanize us in new ways. In “Generation Z: online and at risk” Nicholas Kardaras disagrees, asserting that people with addictive personalities, particularly young people, are risking their mental health by favoring their online connections over their ordinary ones.
Jameson (1992: 11) notes that, “If everything means something else, then so does technology.” Particularly in an era where technological change is so very rapid, and where traditionally accepted notions about the position and function of the subject in a community or society have come under sustained attack, visions of dystopia and utopia ask just what technology might come to mean for us, in an age where living in diverse city communities challenges the dominance of any single meaning.
Why is technology a source of erotic thrill? A central motivation is the relationship with power. Technology provides control over power, and, by extension, power over the "Other". After the beginning of the nineteenth century, machines came to be perceived as threatening and uncontrollable entities, and thus made the object of displacement and projection of patriarchal fears towards female sexuality. The physical manifestations of industrial machines, such as size, shape and motions (thrust/pause/press), provided straightforward metaphors for human sexual responses, and the increasingly widespread use of cars made it possible to the large mass of consumers to experience the extension and transformation of the human body through exhilarating blasts of speed and power. The drastic changes in technology have brought a new kind of awareness. As an object of erotic attraction, electronic technology is of a different order from the industrial one exemplified by the car. The masculine power of size and motion has been replaced by the feminized and miniaturized intricacy of electronic circuitry. Re-production has supplanted production and space has become an abstract entity hidden behind the opaque screen of computers and electronic equipments. The more overt sexual connotations of power and strength of industrial machinery has given way to an ambiguous relationship with gender roles and sexual identity. Small size, fluid and quiet functioning computers, which provide the practical possibility to assume on-line personae, invert or blend gender roles. The erotic and exciting feeling experienced with electronic circuitry transgresses the notion of solely body control, in that cybernetics enables control over the information and, for those who own the technology, control over the consumer classes. Donna Haraway's call for a feminist embrace of technology is grounded on the recognition that the technological evocation of feminine metaphors in terms of appearance and functioning does not acknowledge the dangers hidden behind the process of miniaturization: "small is not so much beautiful as pre-eminently dangerous as in cruise missiles" (153).
Donna Haraway’s essay, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ is an analysis of women and advanced technology in a postmodern world. Haraway uses various illustrations to focus on women’s relation to the technologically scientific world, she uses the metaphor of a cyborg to challenge feminists and engage in a politics beyond naturalism and essentialisms. She also uses the idea of the cyborg to offer a political strategy for the dissimilar interests of socialism and feminism. In her manifesto, Haraway describes a cyborg as a hybrid of machine and organism or a cybernetic organism, created by the advances in technology.
There have been many great books that have been based on the growing relationship of technology and human beings. Today, technology is continuously changing and evolving along with the way people adapt to these technological advances. Technology has completely changed our way of living, it has entwined with our humanity, by being able to replace limbs and organs that we once thought could not be replaced. One of the most crucial things that technology has changed is the way people in society interact with one another. A story written by William Gibson titled “Burning Chrome”, portrays that very idea. In his text, Gibson presents that the reader lives within a world where there is no boundaries or limitations between technology and humans. They become a part of each other and have evolved side by side into a society where a person can turn their conscious mind into data and upload it to non-physical, virtual world. In this research paper I will discuss how our society’s culture and interaction with one another has changed and adapted with the advancements of technology over the years.
Haraway’s cyborg is a blending of both materiality and imagination, pleasure and responsibility, reality and the utopian dream of a world without gender and, maybe, without end. We are all hybrids of machine and organism. The cyborg is our ontology, a creature in a post-gender world with "no origin story in the...
Haraway, Donna. `A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980's', Socialist Reivew, Vol. 15, No. 80, 1985
3. Simians, Cyborgs, and Woman: The Reinvention of Nature. Haraway, Donna J. Routledge. Florence, KY, USA
Harroway, Donna . "Cyborgs to Companion Species: Reconfiguring Kinship in Technoscience." English 387 Course Pack. Regina: Professor J. Battis, 2009. 304-311. Print.