What is a Cyborg?

From CyborgCamp Portland

"The traditional boundaries between humans and machines have undergone a near-dissolution in recent years. Most of us already know people with pacemakers, reconstructed joints, or artificial or transplanted organs. By means of their bodily incorporation of machine (and especially computer) technology, these people dissolve the distinction between organisms and machines. Their status as " cyborgs" -- part human, part machine -- exposes the leakiness of the distinction between technology and nature. By questioning the traditional method of defining what is human (which usually entails comparisons with creature that fall into an equally badly-defined category of what is not), they question our received notions of what it means to be human. Through them, we begin to recognize the limited utility of the distinction between nature and culture. As Donna Haraway puts it, " Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert" [152].

Excerpt from Hypertext '96: The Seventh ACM Conference on Hypertext, N.Y.: ACM, 1996, 87-88.

© 2008-2012 by cyborgcamp.org and contributors.