What Cyborg Are You?

The global industrialization in twentieth century rapidly shaped the human society in political, economical, cultural and other aspect. The idea of machine replacing human beings has been concerned by many scholars and scientists themselves. The definition of human being and the definition of machine ha s been challenged as they gradually become into a non-separated integration. We now have artificial limbs, man-made blood vessels and even micro-chips in our brains. In A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century, a well-known essay published in the late twentieth century, Donna Haraway developed the notion of Cyborg. She states that there is no actual boundary among “human”, “animal”, and “machine”. She defines cyborg as “a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction” (Weiss 117). Indeed, machine changed people’ life and it becomes a built-in object in human beings practically and ideologically. To Haraway, we are all cyborgs. On top of that, I consider that cyborg is the collaboration or replacement of one common ideology to the next one. As machine helps human to act and think faster and better, its replacement in our life causes physical, biological and ideological degeneration of human activities. We do not live with machine anymore, we live upon them. In other words, the artificial part in human’s body and mind becomes overwhelming to the natural/organic part. A lizard can still survive after it cuts its tail under special circumstance, just like a man can easily have a transplant of a limb, a lung even a heart. Brain death is considered to be the legal indicator of death in common . A man can live wit...

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...w community will attempt harder to establish its individual identity from the rest and start striving for its own benefits. Once the group is settled, it’s the group members themselves who push the wheel of becoming cyborg faster and faster, which imprints the identity on their minds and souls as integrity. The question is: which wheel of being cyborg you are pushing?

Work cited

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Edogawa, Ranpo. Japanese tales of Mysery & Imagination. Osaka: Tuttle Publishing 2003. Print.

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