Excuse me, are you a Cyborg?

Wearable Keyboard

Are we all cyborg nowadays?

Or the question should be alter to : What makes us to be defined as cyborg?

Does carrying gadgets make me a cyborg?

or does using new media technology makes me a cyborg?

Those are the questions that generated in my mind when the term cyborg hit my mind.

But the core question that i am really trying to answer is still : what makes us to be defined as cyborg.

Here's my general definition of cyborg to begin with:

cyborg as a discourse of technology that is developed to help with human's deficiency and limitation.

In my opinion, being a 'cyborg' does not carry any negative connotations, e.g: geek, techno-crazy etc. Having multiple gadgets and technology assistance in your life doesn't make you a cyborg either. What really define us as a cyborg rely on the discursive discourses that are behind it. For example, the humanism discourse supporter will claim that they are not cyborgs because they believe in the notion of human-nature, where human should celebrate what they are born and given with, but not trying too hard to invent something that is outside of the scope of human nature.

What i am trying to argue is that, by enjoying the conveniences and benefits that the new media technology brought us does not make us a cyborg; rather, is the way how we are using it to reconstruct our capability as human. I would suggest that new media technologies, especially those ones that extent our limitation and provide a remedy for human deficiency, could be considered in the notion of cyborg. This is because technologies like such, have shifted away from what our human nature can do, by extending or providing a remedy to our limitation and deficiency. For instance, the article by Kingsley Dennis talk about how neuro-technology is going to be the new trend, where thoughts and ideas of the citizen might be surveilled with the introduction of neuro-technology. This is what i regarded as extended human limitation or deficiency, where new media technology achieve something where human body are not capable of.

Cyborg to me, is more like a notion than a physical being, e.g: those robotic monster-like creature that we always get in the sci-fi movie genre. What define us as a cyborg is our relationship with new media technology, but not with all the gadgets that we owned or equipped.

In turn, the notion of cyborg is rather contested. We have all these gadgets that we use on a daily basis that serves the purpose of extending our human capability to do something that is outside of what our body can normally achieve. For example: Cellphones that enable us to talk to someone that is miles away from us and so on. In my perspective, the fact of how we uses it to achieve incredible result that our normal body will not be able to is the part that associate us with the notion of cyborg.