Time ago – in the industrialized fragment of our planet – human gender became Cyborg by the integration of technological devices as plug & play extensions of our manhood functionalities. Donna Haraway advanced this fact more than 20 years ago.
‘By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. This cyborg is our ontology’ (Haraway, Cyborg Manifesto 1991: page. 150)
Not so? Ok: Could you feed and dress yourself without a credit card? Don’t you drive a car when you need to go faster (bus, metro…)? Would you voluntarily decline to use a mobile phone? Those devices are a chunk of our lives, a portion of us and our definition as a postmodern human being is not complete without them. Not yet convinced? What about glasses or contact lenses?
We currently identify a Cyborg as someone who changes his legs to put wheels in place, or who connects a communication device directly to his brain, or… ok! Maybe in a film, but would you accept visiting the surgeon each time you changed your mobile phone? It is much easier to keep it in your pocket, isn’t it?
But this doesn’t mean we aren’t Cyborgs. To be a Cyborg is our ontology.
