To just imagine getting through an average day without it would send shivers up most of our spines!

So where is it going to take us next?

Click here to view the embedded video.

Martin Cooper highlights the future capabilities of the machine suggesting  that in time phones will be used to flag and monitor medical conditions held within the body of the holder. Cooper believes that the minimalist look is set to continue suggesting in a 2010 interview with the BBC that:

“[T]he cellphone in the long range is going to be embedded under your skin behind your ear along with a very powerful computer who is in effect your slave”  promoting what Haraway (2000) refers to as the ambiguity created by machines “in the difference between natural and artifical, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert.” (Haraway, 2000, p.36]

Haraway, D. (2000). A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late 20th Century. in D Bell and A Kennedy, The Cybercultures Reader. Routledge.

So many of the cyborg associations that I have identified over the past two weeks have taken the human/machine form. What of the animal/human merger? What of the mermaid?

The other evening I found myself mesmerized by a Discovery Channel documentary Mermaids The Body Found. Armed with a cynical raised eyebrow I initially thought that this was an elaborate April Fool’s day joke but a little digging online revealed a different set of ‘facts’.

Originally aired on Animal Planet in May 2012 it harvested high viewer ratings and re-aired on the Discovery channel the following month. The documentary is described as “science  fiction based on some real events and scientific theory” and puts forward a hefty argument toward the possibility of the real existence of these mythical sea creatures.

Click here to view the embedded video.

It is this blending of science fiction and fact where we might view the mermaid as “a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction” ( Haraway, 2000, p.34)

Haraway, D. (2000). A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late 20th Century. in D Bell and A Kennedy, The Cybercultures Reader. Routledge.

At the dinnertable two weeks ago my teenage son told me of a revolutionary visual aid that changes how we can ‘see’ the world. All hail Google Glass! Imagine my surprise to read an article during the week on the same subject in the Independent explaining the detrimental ramifications of such technology as expressed by social technology movement Stop the Cyborgs.

Over the past couple of weeks I have been trying to find examples of real life cyborg in today’s world. At the beginning of my reflection on cyborgs I questioned the need for the attachment of conscience in the creation of cyborg, hammered home by an unequivocal belief in the non-human component’s merger with the human body. Does Google Glass take such a melting of the two a step further? The technology has a social immersion aspect that not only has the potential to change how we see but possibly how we live.

“[t]he world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as in an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside.”(McLuhan, 1962, p.32)

McLuhan, M. (1962) The Gutenberg galaxy: the making of typographic man. Toronto: University of Toronto Press

 Today is World Poetry Day 2013! I thought that it would be fun to have a go at putting together a cyborg inspired sonnet…Poetry not  my thing but figured I’d give it a whirl anyhow!

The marriage of machine to man may create a form that exhibits characteristics beyond those capable of man. Science fiction holds examples of these in abundance, from James Cameron’s Terminator [The Terminator, 1984] to Ridley Scotts’ Deckard [Bladerunner, 2007 [final cut]].

How does a transference of such fusion sit outside of the fiction arena?

Is the ‘fusion’ itself enough in terms of a valid definition of cyborg? Perhaps even the term ‘fusion’  is subjective. Who decides to what extent the machine enfolds into the man and vica versa?

Is ‘use of’ the machine sufficient?  Or in the realisation of a cyborg definition do we tiptoe down the eXistenZ route of becoming the machine and the machine becoming us?

Reflecting more on this…