Module 4 : Culture Industries, Cultural Forms

Lecture 7 : Cyberculture


Chris Hables Gray in Cyborg Citizen (2002) highlights issues of participatory development, citizenship and human rights in the cyber world and describes a cyborg in a way easy to understand:

“A cyborg is a self-regulating system that combines the natural and the artificial together in one system. Cyborgs do not have to be part human, for any organism that mixes the evolved and the made, the living and the inanimate, is technically a cyborg…. If you have been technologically modified in any significant way, from an implanted pacemaker to a vaccination that reprogrammed your immune system, then you are definitely a cyborg.”

Therefore in cyberculture we find a posthuman world in which the human is no longer the central point of reference. And there is a radically new and complex living experience. It not only means that we are related to machines, but it also means that we are related to other animals though the machine part of it is highlighted here.