Cyber-bricoleurs: living and working in the 21st Century
Cyborgs
The image of the cyborg as a super-human combination of the mortal and technology has been part of popular culture for more than twenty years. The term ‘cyborg’ was initially coined to describe human enhancement: a man-machine system, or hybrid, that would be necessary to survive in, and adapt to, the extra-terrestrial environments of space flight. Routine checks and monitoring would be undertaken automatically, so that the human would be free to create, think, feel and explore. (Clynes and Kline, 1960) Cyborgs can also be seen as the tangled networks of meat, metal and technologies that we have become: creatures in a world that is post-gender (Haraway, 1985).
The integration with technology enables humans to transcend their corporeal limitations. This is true for individuals fitted with prosthetic limbs; with heart pacemakers or whose use of pharmaceuticals enables them to overcome bodily malfunction. Science fiction fantasies on television and film, such as The Six Million Dollar Man, Terminator or Robocop, provide a leitmotif for the concerns of our age in much the same way as Frankenstein served for the Enlightenment. Cyborgs, then, provide a route for us to stand aside from the limitations imposed on our bodies by restrictions of race, gender, class and socio-economic status.
See the interview with Donna Haraway from the last century: You Are Cyborg
Donna Haraway’s seminal paper can be accessed here: A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century
