Is an age of cyborg's upon us?

Stelarc, an Australian performance artist introduces the theory that “the concept of ‘human’ is unthinkable without technology”, is aided by the example of William Harvey’s early seventeenth century circulatory system discovery which David Shaw discuss’ as “…our idea of what a fully functioning body is.’ He uses this complex idea of the use of technology to enable affection and examination of the body to illustrate the theory that without technology and adequate tools our understanding of how it works, development of the body and medical productions needed to keep it active would not be where it is today.

Michel Foucault believes that the human body is manipulated and changed in accordance to the technology it consumes, therefore believing technology is in control and can consume and discipline a person.

The constant bombardment of media imagery and enhanced technology create an ideological appropriation of fitness, health, gender, race and sexuality etc. People can allow this to discipline their being and can base their way of life around this creation, ultimately shaping and controlling who they are today.

“Control may take the form of exercises, punishments and regimes…” Shaw states this in relation to a well-disciplined soldier or army; however, this is evident in today’s society with the regimes of information technologies such as social networking sites, i.e. Facebook and Twitter etc. where consumers of these technologies are now being consumed by the technology itself, with examples of online identities and so on.

Cybernetics is defined by Shaw as “the relationship between a mechanism and its environment.”  It is overall a theory of the existing environment being ‘produced by’ positions of the body but also being the ‘producer of’ these.

When discussing this Shaw relates to human’s being the mechanism and New Media Technology being the environment. For example, the same way radio and television transmit sound and light patterns, due to DNA within the human body, humans to an extent transmit their own ideological ‘pattern’, open to manipulation and control by the surrounding, enhancing ‘environment’.

Wiener discusses these ‘patterns’ as ‘characterized activities’ produced by humans, which could be duplicated by machinery through mechanical feedback and could overall adapt to the idea of the machine age and cyborg bodies.

“They refer to the ideal body, which corresponds to a suitably organized mind, as ‘molar’.”

Overall, through human’s relationship with technology and the cultural consumption of today’s post-modern society it is evident that technology is both produced by and the producer of the human body. Both technology and humans coexist, but alongside this also depend on each other for feedback and feedforward to transmit and generate enhancements, however, with the enhancements of technology today, there is no doubt that a cyborg age is upon us. 

Bibliography 

SHAW, Debra (2008). Technoculture: the key concepts. Oxford, Berg Publishers.