Week 10 - Games & Avatars

Do you agree that you are cyborgian in nature?

The answer for the tutorial question above is yes. The reason is we are we are constantly relying on machines such as handphones, car, laptop that we are addicted to it and makes us difficult to live without them. The more we rely on prosthetic, the less usage of our natural or real body parts. This is true as the advances of technology take place, we are nearly can be someone we wished to be with senseless of feeling on what we do or say. According to Clark (2003, p.10) stated that ‘what makes us distinctively human is our capacity to continually restructure and re-build our own mental circuitry, courtesy of an empowering web of culture, education, technology, and artifacts.’

In addition, we cannot live without the machine as they have been apart of our life. Levy (2001) also stated, "we cannot separate the material world- even less so its artificial component -from the ideas through which technological objects are conceived and used, or from the humans who invent, produced and used them."

Another reason for this agreement of the question above is the need of prosthetic is needed to restore information as a memory in other way to help the brain and the body to gain more information. For example is on prosthetic memory, which is the computer. According Landsberg (2004) defined prosthetic memories as "emerges at the interface between a person and a historical narrative about the past, at an experiential site such as movie theater or museum."

In conclusion, we are more depending on technologies as prosthetics and it is difficult for us to live without them as this technology as part of our lives. Therefore we are cyborgian in nature.

References:

Clark, A. (2003). Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Landsberg, A. (2004). Posthetic Memory: The Transformation of American rememberance in the age of new mass culture. NewYork: Columbia University Press.

Levy, P. (2001). Cyberculture. United State of America: University of Minnesota Press.