Homo Cyborgus
Saturday, August 8, 2009 by Tanz
Many people, including myself, have been reluctant to label themselves cyborgs. The common reasoning behind this, is that people feel that being a cyborg somehow means they lose part of what makes them human. Cyborg theory however does not argue that there should be a movement from human to machine, but instead that there shouldn't be a term for these at all. Cyborg theory originated from social constructionism, which argues that all the categories and concepts through which we understand the world are due to our social interactions, and therefore these interactions are what form our realities an truths. Thus it argues it is as crazy to categorize people by being short or tall as it is to categorize male or female/human or cyborg.
Cyborgs from this perspective are a little less scary to me, rather than thinking of myself as becoming a machine, I think of myself as simply evolving, that being human isn't a fundamental truth, but rather a social construct. With the large amount of artificial intelligence research taking place at the moment, I hope that society's definition of human may change, in order to allow inventions such as the one below to help us evolve and improve humanity
"What about all the starving children in Africa who can't even afford food?" Well as long as there are initiatives such as One Laptop per Child, I don't feel it's too naive to think that technology may be able to help in some way, and should therefore be embraced, rather than shunned out of fear.
I like the way you've described humanity as an evolving concept. I think the case of Caster Semanaya this week serves to demonstrate just how problematic it is to think of being male/female/(human) in rigid terms -
and to me this is what is valuable about Cyborg theory.
The clips you've chosen are both really interesting too. (Very disquieting performance by Bruce Willis' hairpiece in The Surrogate though!)
The trailer is for the latest cyborg film, The Surrogates. No wonder there is so much paranoia and fear surrounding the technological movement when the possible devastation is so entertaining.