While we generally focus on contemporary cyborgs and new technologies, the case below illustrates the longstanding entanglement of human bodies and technology. And yes, this is a medieval prosthetic hand.
According to David Forbes over at Coilhouse, this little guy belonged to famed mercenary and medieval knight Gotz Von Berlichingen of the early 1500s.
In my Theorizing the Web presentation last April, I gave a presentation entitled Practical Cyborg Theory: Discovering a Metric for the Emancipatory Potential of Technology. I wanted to develop a cyborg theory that helps us understand the emancipatory potential of a given technology or technological system. My formal hypothesis was an addendum to Haraway’s definition of a cyborg in the Cyborg Manifesto:
A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, who’s existence and emancipatory potential is constructed as a function of the temporal and social environment within which it operates.
Just came across the personal blog of Nick Pearce, a scholar at Durham University’s Foundation Centre, who is doing some very interesting research on higher education, technology, and zombies. I discovered his website while researching existing work on zombies and higher education, and I discovered that he is one of the scholars putting together the much-awaited anthology “Zombies in the Academy: Living Death in Higher Education” (to be published in 2012).
I was particularly drawn to an old post on “Zombies, Technology, and Capitalism,” because of Pearce’s use of the zombie metaphor in depicting some of the recent trends in higher education. He states rather eloquently:
The very general thrust is that VLEs (such as Black(magic)board, and VOODLE) replace face-to-face ‘human’ learning with undead digital teaching. These VLEs have rapidly spread across the sector (virally?) without being explicitly demanded by either teachers or students. The embedded pedagogy of these VLEs is restrictive and they offer a level of social control and conformity not possible with more traditional teaching practices.
In Pearce’s words, the Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) of today’s academy sap the human element out of the classroom (or computer screen in this case). more...
“We’re not computers, […] we’re physical,” explains the Blade Runner‘s chief antagonist, a replicant named Roy Batty. In this moment of dialogue, Blade Runner engages a frequent themes of the Cyborgology blog—the implosion of atoms and bits, which we term “augemented reality.” In this statement, Roy unpacks the assumption that digitality and physicality are mutually exclusive, while, simultaneously, transcending the boundary between the two. Put simply, Roy is contending that computers cease to be mere computers when they become embodied. In contrast to the familiar theme of cyborganic trans-humanism, Roy is articulating (and embodying) the obverse theory: trans-digitalism.
This Copernican turn—de-centering humans’ role in understanding of the universe—is, undoubtedly, one of the great contributions of the cyberpunk genre (and science fiction, more broadly). Quite provocatively, it points to the possibility of a sociology, or even anthropology, where humans are no longer the direct object of inquiry. The question, here, shifts, from how we are shaped by and interact with our tools, to how technology itself becomes an actors (or even agents!) in a particular social milieu. more...
Lately I have been trying to list all of the spaces, places, moments in time, story telling techniques, life courses, and jobs that are not popularly considered “the real world.” Here is the not-so-comprehensive list I came up wtih:
A note about number 3 (and 4). I say “books” as a whole, to capture two sentiments. The first, is an aversion to the nerdy bookworm that is exemplified in The Twilight Zone’s “Time Enough At Last” (SPOILER). The second is a sort of anti-intellectualism more...
In his Beyond the Beyond blog (hosted by WIRED magazine), cyberpunk author Bruce Sterling recently made some comments on my post, “Cyborgs and the Augmented Reality they Inhabit.”
[…] an argument about the definition of Augmented Reality and the definition of Cyborgs, until you can get ‘em to click together like puzzle pieces. But so much debris is left on the floor when they’re done with the theory tin-shears, that the debris looks more interesting than the remainder.
The Cyborgology Blog has recently hosted much discussion on the topic of augmented reality (i.e., the co-constitution of online and offline, digital and physical). A few threads to follow as background are:
Digital Dualism versus Augmented Reality by Nathan Jurgenson
Virtual, Mediated, and Augmented Reality by PJ Rey
why i don’t like “augmented reality” by Sang-Hyoun Pahk
Defending and Clarifying the Term Augmented Reality by Nathan Jurgenson
I’d like to extend this discussion by clarifying the relationship between augmented reality and the namesake of the Cyborgology blog (i.e, the cyborg). The two concepts are intimately connected. more...
ok so i have a few complaints about the use of “augmented reality.” the first is primarily semantic. it seems (to me at least) like the term it implies some kind of (pre-digital?) “non-augmented” reality. this is more or less explicit when we refer to things like “augmented revolution” or “augmented conference.” it seems like the idea of augmented reality was introduced to make a point against a false binary (“digital dualism”) and i agree that this is important, both academically and in real life (see what i did there?). but i think the way we talk about augmented reality is sneaking a version of that binary back in. not the naive real v virtual but maybe something like real v “real+” and i think that is a mistake. and it is a strange mistake to read here, on a blog called “cyborgology” that proclaims (rightly i’m sure) that we have always been cyborgs. our friends from sst especially, i think, are sensitive to how reality has always been “augmented” if we are paying attention. more...
