Participation Literacy

The idea for Part III came from Steven Warwick and his task of turning himself into a man-machine hybrid (2000). He is calling himself a cyborg, and I agree he is a cyborg. But a cyborg is much more, or other than, connecting my nervous system to a set of tools, learning my mind to control them by thought. It is strange that a piece of metal operated into a human body would render a new entity, something other than a human. Theodore Sturgeon wrote a science fiction novel with the name More than Human (1981). It was published the first time in 1953 and told the story of six child prodigies maturing to one gestalt consciousness. If we remove the tiny bit of hocus pocus holding the super brain together, and replace it with technology - then we have something, which could be called the beginning of the Native Web Cyborg figure.

At first, I tried to write about this figure in third person. I wanted to discuss certain features in the Web 2.0 mindset from the construction of the figure above. But as I wrote I noticed it was more difficult than usual to rip this figure out from myself and apply it on other persons – a Native Web Cyborg involves at least one person. The reason is that this text is not fiction, it is about truth. As Donna Haraway says in her foreword to the Cyborg Handbook:

And, naturally, my stories are all true, or at least they aim to be, and in several dimensions at once. My hope is that this kind of truth is situated and accountable, and therefore able to be in power-sensitive engagement, with other versions and materializations of the world (Gray, 1995).

All my stories here are true from a situated perspective in the context I operate. As I reflected on this figure I understood I had to apply it on myself for the figure to become true and accountable. I understood why Kevin Warwick is transforming himself to a cyborg. If he had used another person as object of research, he could not possibly create accountable knowledge from an outside perspective. He would be able to measure everything regarding the cyborg’s physical expressions and he could also do thorough interviews. This approach could be called mainstream science. Warwick’s approach and the approach I am going to follow here is more about