What is a cyborg and am I one already? According to Clynes (1960) who coined the term 'cyborg':
"The cyborg deliberately incorporates exogenous compo- nents extending the self-regulatory control function of the organism in order to adapt it to new environments."
In other words, a cyborg is used to explain mankind to artificially improve and intensify biological functions in order to survive in the unfriendly environment of Space. Simply, a cyborg refers to a human being with bodily functions that are literally controlled or aided by technological devices. It was mentioned in our lecture slide by our lecturer Chris Woo (2012) that in 1998 Lury wrote in her book Prosthetic Culture that we live in a world where it is impossible to survive without technological prosthetics. We live in a cultural period that is sometimes called the Information Age. We are overwhelmed with so many information that the mind and body is not capable to handle pressure and thus we need prosthetics to overcome these pressure. What I meant by prosthetics are things like memory cards, softwares, pen drive, oxygen tanks, insulin pump, photographs and so on.
How can we not say that we are cyborgs in nature? Before we go to bed, we would hold our mobile phones and set our alarm. Some times we would play whatever game applications there are installed until we fall asleep. Other times, people like me, we would go through social sites such as Facebook, Twitter or Instagram where we basically just scroll down and read and view whatever there is to view online. There really is no purpose to it, personally saying but it seems like the hands are set to do such things. We grab our mobile phones to talk and chat with our family and friends. We update one another with the latest 'in thing' or 'hot story' that goes on in Brunei.. is the evidence not clear enough? More over, we wake up in the morning and it seems automatically that we would reach out for our mobile phones (set setting the alarm clock off) or iPads and just literally scroll our fingers on the touch screen and wait until we sober up from sleep. I mean, I do that. So yes, I agree that I am a Cyborg in nature.
In addition, we are the generation that rely so much on technologies that even our academic research is usually based on the internet. We make full use of eBooks just to finish up our thousands of words essay by using the Google engine. We type down our essays in the Word Document and then we use printers to print our papers. Are printers not a part of technology? Yes, yes it is. As far as we can remember, since the time that we are able to use the computer, we would learn the functions of these computes. One of them is by copy pasting. How easily life has become due to that. Well, obviously we cannot copy paste easily though, we'd have to paraphrase every little thing now and then just so we're not plagiarizing. See what I mean by how we rely and think that technologies (in this case: the computer and the Internet) is the reason why we survive?
To end this post, I would like to come to a conclusion that we can see very clearly how true Lucy Lury's argument was. We are already living in a world where it is literally impossible to survive without technological prosthetics. This highlights James (1996) where he claims that "the concept of human being as being cyborgs, half-man, half-machine is when their physical capabilities are broadened and largely greater than their physical deficiencies".
References:
Clynes, M. & Kline, N. S. (1960). Cyborgs and Space. Retrieved on November 17, 2012 from http://cyberneticzoo.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/cyborgs-Astronautics-sep1960.pdf
James, J. (1996). Thinking in the future tense. Industrial and commercial training. 28(7), 28 – 32.
Woo, Chris. (2010). Analyzing Visual Communication Reader. Brunei Darussalam: Universiti Brunei Darussalam
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