Participation Literacy

A cyborg is a cybernetic mechanism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political construction, a world-changing fiction. The international women’s movements have constructed ‘women’s experience’, as well as uncovered or discovered this crucial collective object. This experience is a fiction and fact of the most crucial, political kind (Haraway, 1991, p 149).

When I read this much cited piece of text I was caught up with the word mechanism. I knew the meaning, but what did a dictionary say, more specifically?

1. a piece of machinery.
2. a process by which something takes place or is brought about.
3. (Philosophy) the doctrine that all natural phenomena allow mechanical explanation by physics and chemistry.[1]
   

The third definition is about the mechanical view of Universe from Enlightenment thinkers such as Newton and Descartes. This definition suggests a modern view of the word mechanism, while other mechanism-related words are possible within the paradigm often called postmodernism. The word mechanism is marked by the cog wheel image from Newton’s Universe. But in our times where postmodern thinking is gaining on the modern view of the world, cog wheels are most often ruled by integrated circuits, which in their turn are ruled by algorithms. While cog wheels and integrated circuits are hardware, algorithms are software. Both hardware and software are human expressions. Our world in the beginning of the third millennium is mostly about hardware, such as tables, coffee machines and computer screens. This balance will probably change since the space for algorithms and interfaces is both practically and theoretically endless. Our physical universe will be more and more abstract as the space of software outgrows the space of hardware. Or in other words, Cyberspace will outgrow the space we now call reality. This is not meant in deterministic terms. It is us, the everywo/man of tomorrow, who will create this software space; not technology itself. Folksonomy is a very human way to grow this space.

All three definitions above are valid, but they seldom work on their own. The cyborg mechanism incorporates all three of these definitions. In a profane view, both humans and cyborgs are some kind of machines. The mechanistic view of the cyborg contains more from postmodern epistemology than from modern ones. The most important of these three, though, is the second. A cyborg is a process. Most people would agree that everything in our common world might be characterized as processes, but that is not so self-evident or easy to grasp. The human vision has fundamental impact on our world. Our vision tells us that most things are static. When we register an entity with our vision it is mostly static. A car for example might drive along the road. The car is involved in a process, but the car itself remains the same. It is only the location of the car that changes. But if you saw this car an hour later, you might notice that it was dirty, or that one of its lights went out. In some sense our vision records these versions of the car as two different entities, but the brain considers a large contextuality and creates a processual connection between these two car entities. Let us imagine you see this car one year later. It is repainted and every detail is changed besides the number plate. It is still in the same process, but is it the same car? An even more appropriate example is the human body. “Your body renews most of its cells within each seven years of your life, for instance, and its molecules are turned over far faster” (Sahtouris, 2000). What is the relation between the Me of today and the Me ten years ago? If this is a relevant way to reason, there is not anything static about me. Both Me and the context I exist in are processes.

I am a part of the cyborgization process we – mankind – embarked on the first time we used tools to enhance our lives. I feel strongly my own private cyborgization process, which has very much to do with the World Wide Web. It is much more than just learning, and using. It is becoming. In the beginning of the new millennia I wrote a piece of text to illustrate the cyborgization process. You find it in Appendix II in Swedish.

[1] “mechanism n.” The Concise Oxford English Dictionary. Ed. Catherine Soanes and Angus Stevenson. Oxford University Press, 2004. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. Blekinge Tekniska Högskola. 28 March 2006