The cocept of the cyborg is an imagination; a ficticious being. By definition, a cyborg is half machine, half human. Yet since the advent of anime characters (lain, ghost in a shell, animatrix), the creature has become easily accepted and socialised into our conciousness.
It’s existence is hardly argued. We understand the parametres in which it operates- it is a cyber baby, connected to the wire, with the semblence of a human, sans doute. It is our understanding of science fiction genres and day to day amazement with technology that makes us indifferent to such a ficticous construct.
More importantly though, i think that our nonchalant attitude towards the concept of a cybourg is due to the fact that people in contemporary societies can easily realate to it. The cybourg symbolises what it means to be human in the modern world. We are, arguably, just as dependent on “the network” (internet, tv, radio, mobile phones) as the cyborgs are on their wire. Just to think, we are in contact with machines on a minite-to-minite basis. Mobiles are literally, “the extension of the arm”. Online networks such as myspace and facebook facilitate daily socialising and communication, and moreover act as a nursery where we can redefine ourselves. People construct facebook pages and blogs as self-imposed shrines, used to recreate a new or different machinic subjectivity, of whom they wish to be portrayed as.
The question this bears though, is that are these online personalities faithful to our true machinic subjectivity? Are they real identities?
Of coarse there is no “true identity”, as identity is flux, constantly changing with different people, contexts, agendas and regimes. The online persona is just as much a valid form of expressionn than in reality, the two are just different, exposing and downplaying different parts of our identity. In fact, i beleive the binaries between our day to day self and our online being are quite leaky, they are not mutually exlusive; we can essentially be both. Therefore, our dependence on “the network” and idea that machines are becoming added assemblages to our being is evident, similar to that of a cyborg.
It’s interesting that we view the internet as a place where we can recreate ourselves into a ‘new machinic subjectivity.’ This idea only extends so far, as it is so difficult to escape the hierarchies that define us under patriarchal capitalism. Even being a ‘cyborg’ (ie. having access to new technologies that operate as extensions of the self) is hierarchical. Perhaps we should question the need to theorize in terms of new technologies when there is still a large portion of the world that haven’t become ‘cyborgs’..