Participation Literacy

The Native Web Cyborg is an intersection and an offspring of the Web 2.0 discourse and the stories about Cyborgs told by authors and researchers like Donna Haraway and Steven Warwick. This entity was moulded by bodies, voices and technology. It was born many thousand years ago when the human race was young and recently learned how to create tools. In that moment the three main organs of the Native Web Cyborg had matured: it had a body, it had a voice, and it had technology.

Donna Haraway’s cyborg figure embodies the intersection of our most dear dualisms like mind-body, nature-culture, animal-human, and fact-fiction. It is one of the most complex figures in the research community. Her criteria for the cyborg are ironic and they are not meant to be taken literally, though they are certainly meant to be taken very seriously. Donna Haraway’s cyborg figure is a rhetorical trope of rare complexity. A semiotic specialist would not have a problem in writing a brick thick book on the rhetorical nature of the figure. Haraway’s cyborg figure is the intersection of all tropes such as metaphor, metonymy, irony, allegory etc.

The most prominent trope is Irony. It is explicit, and she stresses that several times in the first paragraph of A Cyborg Manifesto. Irony is the most radical of the four main tropes (Chandler, 2004) [metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony]. The signifier of the ironic sign seems to signify one thing but another signifier tell us that it actually signifies something very different” (Chandler, 2004). The first heading in A Cyborg Manifesto says “AN IRONIC DREAM OF A COMMON LANGUAGE FOR WOMEN IN THE INTEGRATED CIRCUIT”(1991). Literally she says that her message is a dream, but what she really says is that it is very much reality. It becomes a very strong emphasis on “real” since she chooses to use irony to raise the statement beyond the literary text. When we continue to read we have irony in mind, and tend to be more sensitive to the rest of the text. So her words are in a way a warning flag, or a reading guide, or both.

The most important feature of the cyborg figure is the deconstruction of binary opposites, and the most important of these binaries is material-semiotic, because it is some kind of blue print for most of the other binary opposites. Even the dualism good-evil (two of the most abstract entities – if you can rank such things) tells us the story about the material evil and the immaterial good, which started when the angel Lucifer was sent into exile and started to build the bodily burning hell, while God and his angels remained in their bodiless transcendent heaven. That is at least how it is usually pictured in fiction; reality and fiction perhaps being the most prominent of the material-semiotic children.

The cyborg concept is thus about border crossing. Some authors concentrate on the physical body. As I mentioned, Professor Kevin Warwick at The University of Reading has created a cyborg story about himself, by turning himself into a physical cyborg. The possibility exists to enhance human capabilities: to harness the ever increasing abilities of machine intelligence, to enable extra sensory input and to communicate in a much richer way, using thought alone. Kevin Warwick has taken the first steps on this path, using himself as a guinea pig test subject receiving, by surgical operation, technological implants connected to his central nervous system. Native Web Cyborgs are about Warwick’s cyborg, but this is only a small portion of it. Warwick’s cyborg might be regarded as a distant relative, while Haraway’s cyborg is its parents. When I call myself a Native Web Cyborg it is about embodiment, writing, research, art and music, but most of all it is about ideology. Ideology is the glue of all these tags. Ideology is the energy. All of this is based on the border zone between the web reality and the embodied reality.

Tags: cyborg, dichotomy, haraway, irony, material semiotic, metaphor, native web cyborg, participation, participation literacy, semiotics, tropes, warwick