1. CBQ REVIEW ESSAY: Cyborg Discourse: Technology's Transformation of Communication

Abstract

The notion of the cyborg-a human/technology hybrid-originally conjured extreme reactions from communication scholars. As communication professor Annette Markham describes the divergent views, either computer-mediated communication (CMC) would usher in a utopian age in which communicators would operate in a blissfully disembodied environment, or we would all become reclusive hackers lurking in a darkness only dimly illuminated by a cold, unblinking, computer monitor. The books that are discussed below, while testifying to the stark changes wrought by CMC, have also arrived at a more careful, thoughtful, and accepting analyses of the possibilities presented by it. Perhaps Donna Haraway's groundbreaking essay, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs,” (see The Haraway Readerbelow) is symbolic of the turning point in the approach to CMC. In it, Haraway embraces the erasure of the man/machine boundary-one which had already been signifcantly effaced through existing technologies of medicine, industry, and war-because it ushered in a world without history (and its agonizing conficts), and without beginning or end. Whether for good or bad, Haraway asserts, modern communications has become a science that sees the world as a coding problem. For her acceptance of CMC, Haraway suffered the slings and arrows of many an angry feminist colleague who took a much harsher view of the computer's impact on progressive human relations, but her analysis has been cited, referenced and adopted by many subsequent CMC scholars. Many scholars agree that communication in cyberspace is fundamentally different from previous modes: the presence of others is sensed rather than known, says Mexican anthropologist Lourdes Arizpe, and interaction entails piecemeal creation of a new reality, accomplished through the process of dynamic interplay involving words, symbols, and metaphors. New identities can be constructed by users who easily cross national boundaries, and the traditional demarcation line between bodies and information is effectively effaced. But is this good? Perhaps not, argues author Michael Lewis, who fnds the speed of Internet communication to be “wildly disruptive.” Professors Thomas Lindlof and Brian Taylor worry that over-employment of CMC amounts to abandonment to machines of the researcher's traditional role as interpreter. William J. Mitchell of MIT suggests that today the proper study of mankind is the “electronomadic cyborg,” living in a world dominated by connections. Others argue that CMC is essentially benign, and that its message is not fundamentally new. English professors Mary Hocks and Michelle Kendrick contend that any distinction drawn between the print and the visual is artifcial. Those who insist upon such distinctions, they maintain, live in fear of the world's essentially hybrid nature. Many also fail to appreciate that the development of cyberculture is rooted in the distant past, argues UCLA's N. Katherine Hayles. Its origin is to be found within a social and cultural matrix that extends back centuries, and technology alone, Hayles insists, is incapable of explaining it. Does CMC satisfy a human desire for disembodiment? No, asserts performance artist Stelarc-just the opposite: the Internet offers one the opportunity to impose one's bodily presence into cyberspace. Perhaps CMC marks the way to a futuristic utopia, but how accurate have past visions of such utopias been? Not very, if we look at 1984 and 2001, Darren Tofts and Annemarie Johnson remind us. Their volume, Prefguring Cyberculture, suggests that we would do better to view CMC within a broad cultural context in order to arrive at better understanding of its potential. In Gill Kirkup's The Gendered Cyborg: A Reader, Donna Haraway writes of a 1990's Bell Telephone television commercial in which a pregnant woman phoned her husband in order to transmit the news of her ultrasound examination which she was viewing on a computer screen. Here we see a fascinating visual and verbal interaction of humans, telephone, and computer video display described by Haraway as “Life copies art copies technology copies communication copies life itself.” Such an image presents us with the great promise of cyberculture-its ability to communicate across traditional boundaries to produce hybrid objects of beauty and wonder. Perhaps cyberculture will achieve its promise, or it may go the way of architect Eero Saarinen's futuristic TWA terminal-described by culture critic Marc Dery as “a symbol of things to come that never came.”