New Media as a Cyborgian Encounter

"The destructiveness of war furnishes proof that society has not been mature enough to incorporate technology as its organ, that technology has not been sufficiently developed to cope with the elemental forces of society."

(Benjamin 1936/1969, p.232)

Shaw and Benjamin interestingly draw parallels almost immediately of the machine to war, "A well disciplined army, in fact, can be compared to a well oiled machine." (p.82). Note how Benjamin (p.232) explicitly refers to technology as an organ, and not a tool. The idea of technology as an extension of the self is very well demonstrated in warfare, the "disciplined body" as Shaw refers to it as (p.82) does not refer to itself as an individual but instead classifies itself in relation to it's discipline. For example, an artilleryman does not refer to himself as a "person who uses artillery." At the very base level of language and communication the individual has inseparably identified themselves in unison with their tools.

You can go one step further in this war based analogy and even say that an army demonstrates a few of the properties Manovich (p. 18) defines for New Media;

1. Numerical Representation - instead of numbers, each artifact of a military can be debased to the raw human element. Humans serve as the binary.

2. Modularity - Instead of a picture in a webpage, you can take a tank from the context of a battlefield, a person from the context of a tank, and so on.

3. Automation - The homogenized training regime for every unit results in a population of people with the exact same skill sets. 

4. Variability - Different battlefield arrangements, an battle fought in a desert environment will not have the same arrangement as one fought in an urban environment.

The underlying structure is similar, the properties of automation and variability of New Media serve as the barracks, serving content and training an individual based on their interests. The result being an individual who uses New Media as an extension of identity, no longer a "person who partakes" but a participant. Ultimately however, a question still lingers, are we mature enough as a society to integrate technology as our organ? 

Bibliography

Benjamin, W. (1936/1969). The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction (H. Zohn, Trans.). In H. Arendt (Ed.), Illuminations (pp. 217-251). New York, NY: Schocken Books.

Shaw, D. (2008) Technoculture: The Key Concepts; Oxford Berg Press (P.81-102)

Manovich, L. (2001). The language of new media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.