Week 10 - Games and Avatars in the Information Age

As I see myself, I still consider I am a human being. A complete human being. I might agree that I am cyborgian in nature but in some way. History of people before us without technologies is not a cyborgian. Nowadays too much technologies growth rapidly from different kind of technologies people tend to relay on it so much. This is why people consider cyborgian and not a naturally human. Human who lost their parts of the body will replace with something that can be use and control by human. The way human being today communicate are mostly through the technologies. Mobile phones for example is one of the technologies factors that human being can not live without it. Communicating through social networking, messenger and anything related to the technologies change human being to a cyborg.

From these technologies there's a dating online involved which could lead to online marriage. The concept of online marriage from my point of view is the usage of Avatar and getting married to the net by using an avatar. This is not real marriage. Where as if the meaning of married online as a real person do the wedding ceremony through online on web cam and proper ceremony that can be consider as real marriage, but would anyone do that?

As stated by Lisa Nakamura, (2002) on her book titiled Cybertypes - Race, Ethnicity, and Identitiy on the Internet said: "As in text-only chat, the identities users choose say more about what they want than who they are, or rather, since these are eminently social spaces, what they think others want. In some sense, Club Connect is a racially diverse space, since players are choosing Asian- and African-American-presenting avatars, but since it is impossible to tell the race and ethnicity of these avatars offline, one must ask what kind of authenticity, integrity, or political efficacy these communities can have". (p.54)




From the example of the video above, I would still agree that these are still human beings who use the highest technologies and equipment to become a cyborgian in nature. Their bodies lying down at home, old and not as healthy as what we see.

According to Michael Ian Borer, "The increased use of electronic media, from radio to television to the Internet, is an inseparable consequence of modernization (Giddens 1991, 24). Due to the intricate connection between culture and technology, it is imperative to attempt to comprehend the impact of electronic media on human social relations and self-identity. As such, we need a critical social theory that provides a dialectical optic in order to adjudicate between the utopian and dystopian visions of computer-mediated communication. Working toward such a perspective, I propose the concept of the cyborgian self as an effective category for understanding the interrelationship between technology and humanity. Such an idea gains greater importance as the Internet becomes more affordable and accessible. Other attempts to use "cyborg" terminology have often focused on physical syntheses between humans and machines, such as the use of prosthetics, declaring the arrival of "posthuman" cyborgs (Haraway, 1991; Mazlish, 1993; Stock, 1993; Gray, 2001). The concept of the cyborgian self can incorporate, but is not limited to, material human/technology hybrids. The cyborgian self, however, speaks to a more widespread notion of technology as a cultural phenomenon that both affects and is affected by social actors' actions, practices, and renderings of social reality. Adopting the notion of the cyborgian self, understood as both an anthropological condition and an analytical construct, can be valuable as we make efforts toward a sharper understanding of the intersubjective nature of electronic media and the construction of identities in the contemporary late modern era".

He stated that, "In true cyborgian fashion, both Marcuse and McLuhan were aware of the extent that technology substantially affects everyday social behavior and human consciousness. What sets McLuhan's philosophy of technology apart from Marcuse and others is its radical elimination of the boundaries between technology and biology, consequently averting any degree of technological determinism. His approach is effective because it does not attempt to present technology as autonomous nor ahistorical. By doing this, he keeps the necessary social quality of technology intact. Though Haraway correctly asserts that "cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves" (1991, 177), her thoroughly utopian science fiction is otiose as an analytical resource".

If I were given no body at all, I think I still can communicate through my mouth or hands or any other parts of a body that can make communication easier. No doubt nowadays, high technologies help a lot in every human body parts.





Bibliography:

Nakamura. L. (2002). Cybertypes - Race, Ethnicity and Identitiy on the Internet. Routledge: New York and London.

Borer. MI.The Cyborgian Self: Toward a Critical Social Theory of Cyberspace. Retrieved from http://reconstruction.eserver.org/023/borer.htm.