Current mood:

cyborg-y

Reading Response #2 - Cyborgs Anonymous

Hi. My name is Julie, and I am a cyborg.

What a strange realization. I thought that I would have to have to look like that Seven of Nine character from "Star Trek" to qualify as a cyborg. I think I've been a cyborg for quite a while, too. Much longer than I've had the faculty for realization. I probably became a cyborg when I first learned to use a computer when I was in third grade, playing “Oregon Trail” on Wednesday afternoons. Or maybe not—would I characterize that experience as the first instance of a “dynamic synergy of individuals, technologies, and the contexts they share” (Inman 14)? Maybe I became a true cyborg when I first started using AOL Instant Messenger as a 16-year-old. It was at that point that I feel I was more dynamically extending my "personhood" into technology. Wait—have I been a cyborg from birth? Was I a cyborg in utero, being worked over by the transducers of an ultrasound? I didn’t really have agency then, or (abortion debates aside) much of an identity. I’m not being cheeky; I just want to know if cyborg-hood has a well-defined initiation point, or if it stops and starts. Does it end? I get the sense it’s not static. Is it like a tide, with ebbs and flows? I guess I’ll have to check some of those scholars that Inman mentions, but I need to say that I was fascinated with Inman's example, of Stone's observing Steven Hawking. I find this definition of "cyborg" very real and very enigmatic.

It happens when you’re not looking

According to Inman, a cyborg era is has three simultaneously-occurring urgencies: to recognize and bring to the foreground the individuals working with technology; to treat the technology equitably and conceive of it accurately—as a fluid and flexible entity; and to consider context as imperative and vital, as a integral component and not simply as a backdrop. But, as the other readings for the week clearly show, all of these necessary requirements are being short-changed, not being met at all in schools, workplaces, and other communities across the United States and abroad. Technologies are labeled as “good” and “bad” all the time—I distinctly remember professors telling me that WordPerfect is the “wrong” kind of application (okay, so maybe this is a bit of a stretch). I think that, in Inman’s vision, a cyborg era is a very positive, even ideal time. Can some of us live happily in the cyborg era while some of us simultaneously exist outside its boundaries? As Inman says, “a cyborg era requires agency and activism.” However, some instructors seem to avoid critical pedagogy and the pedagogy of activism. How often do instructors consider, let alone implement, strategies to empower others via technology? I don’t think that Inman is wrong; certainly some of us dwell in the cyborg era (I like to think that many of us in the English department at BGSU do). I also agree that the multitude of un-interrogated labels applied to this “era” make me uneasy. But we don’t all dwell in the cyborg era; with parameters like the ones Inman mentions, we can’t simply assume its existence. It seems that we have to create the cyborg era consciously and bring it to others (was that his point all along? I feel dense).