Posts Tagged ‘cyborg’

Week 10 Lifestream summary

Tuesday, December 1st, 2009

This week, like last week I have been mainly considering my final assignment and getting my Lifestream into some kind of order ready for submission. I was unable to participate in this weeks skype session as we STILL have no internet connection at home (something about the house being very old, blah, blah!). My Lifestream shows evidence of researching around the topic of Transliteracy for my assignment. Although I am unsure of the actual title I have decided upon this topic in some form so am doing some general research. I have been using twitter, delicious and tumblr to display my findings, Im hoping that something will really jump out at me soon and make me want to delve even further!

Reflecting on the last ten weeks I have found some of the topics incredibly engaging and others some what of a challenge, particularly Haraway and our cyborg week! I intend to revisit many of the core and secondary readings in order to pull together our topics from the last ten weeks and feed them into my assignment. I am still very undecided about my method of presentation but am trying to think more about the content at the moment.

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Week 9 lifestream summary

Tuesday, November 24th, 2009

Admittedly there hasn’t been as much activity in my lifestream this week. This may be due to one of two things. I have been struck down with one of my students many colds and therefore have a very fuzzy head OR it may be because I have struggled to get to grips with the whole concept of being a cyborg and posthumanisim, and found Hararway particularly hard going. (The lack of understanding may therefore have been a result of the cold!). I came across a youtube video and posted this to my lifestream. This video, “Donna Haraways’ a manifesto to cyborgs, a youtube presentation” certainly helped me to get my head around her ideas and theories a little better.

I have started to consider my essay topic and methods of presentation. At the moment I am considering exploring transliteracy and how offline methods of communication, teaching and learning have been developed and translated into online forms. The concept of Lifeworlds also interests me. I am going to revisit Sue Thomas’ core reading and delve a little further in week ten.

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What is the difference between a cyborg and a posthuman?

Thursday, November 12th, 2009

What is a cyborg?

After reading Hayles and Haraway and doing a bit of research over the internet I would go with the idea that a cyborg is an organism that has both aftificial and natural systems. We see this in everyday life, as Haraway suggests,

” Modern medicine is also full of cyborgs, of couplings between organism and machine” (Haraway)

Many people now have artificial limbs, for example,

“Jesse Sullivan has now become the worlds first bionoic man, a real life cyborg. Surgeons have attached the most sophisticated artificial arms ever to be designed. He can operate these artificial arms using brain signals. His brain sends signals to the artificial arms to perform a task, the signals are immediatley picked and performed” (http://homepages.uel.ac.uk/u0503234/html/nonfiction/html)  

But does this make them a cyborg? For me, whan I think of a cyborg I instantly think of a character in Dr Who, a machine i human form totally devoid of any of the natural emaotions we possess. Can a cyborg exist and function without the aid of a human? The answer to this is no. As Hayles comments,

“Functionality is a term used by virtual reality technologists to describe the communication modes that are active in a computer-human interface” (Hayles)

Humans can evolve into cyborgs by using new technologies to enhance and control part of themselves, but the cyborg can not live by itself as it is the human developing new technologies and controlling it.

What is a poasthuman?

“The transition from human to posthuman can be defined physically or memetically. Physically, we will have become posthuman only when we have made such fundamental and sweeping modifications to our inherited genetics, physiology, neurophysiology and neurochemistry that we can no longer be classified with homo-sapiens” (More, 1994) 

We seek to become posthuman to go beyond our own human limits. The difference between a cyborg and a posthuman is that a posthuman has, at some point been a human being. The posthuman is a more evolved version of a human being.

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