Digital Culture, Media, and the Challenges of Contemporary Cyborg Youth

• In Event: Bio-Informational Philosophy and Postdigital Knowledge Ecologies

Abstract

Donna Haraway’s 1985 essay ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ evokes the spirit of Marx and Engels and their ‘Communist Manifesto’ (1848/1976) to envision the metaphor of a cyborg as a way to engage politics of identity concerned with intersectional feminism. The manifesto is part ironic, part prophetic, part a call to arms and part revolutionary theoretical action. As Haraway notes, it is important to recognize technologies as ‘crucial tools recrafting our bodies’, and how the tools not only recraft human bodies, but social relations too, marking them ‘as frozen moments of the fluid social interactions constituting them, [and therefore] they should also be viewed as instruments for enforcing meaning’ (Haraway 1985/2006: 130).
These informatics of domination are contentious and oppressive, but they are not fixed or static, since Haraway reminds us that the boundary between tool and myth is permeable, and that all moments of oppression, power, and marginalization, can also be seen as a locus for hope and change. If technology as oppressor exists, then its binary opposite, technology as liberator must also exist too!
So what, then, do we make of today’s teenagers, who conduct themselves live like cyborgs, whose connection to their tools has become so profound and so seamless that it’s difficult to tell where the tool ends and their bodies begin? And what, then, does this mean for the informatics of domination in the lives of young people, whose identities are heavily mediated by the technology of social media platforms? How do they construct and live features of their identities such as gender, race, class, and sexuality in their virtual digital lives?
This study revisits the philosophical concept of the cyborg developed by Donna Haraway and the ways that youth and others are shaped today by technology and digital cultures. As a description of the relationship between contemporary youth and their technologies, the project requires a particular focus on the role that technological forms play in understanding media and the lives of cyborg youth. For Haraway ‘the cyborg is a matter of fiction and lived experience that changes what counts as women’s experience in the late 20th century’, and this is precisely what we are seeking to understand for contemporary youth, giving further credence to Haraway’s claims of cyborg as a ‘hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction’ (1985/2006: 117). Unlike earlier advancements in technology, the actual mediums themselves are no longer merely an extension of the individual, but also involve an entangled embodiment of technologies, capitalism and selves which constitutes a hybrid of poiesis and technē, and is deployed by a centaur of human and machine, which Haraway describes as a ‘cyborg,’ characterized by the primacy, intimacy, and expediency of the mediums themselves in today’s high-tech worlds.

References
Haraway, D. (1985/2006). A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late 20th Century. In J. Weiss, J. Nolan, J. Hunsinger, & P. Trifonas (Eds)., The International Handbook of Virtual Learning Environments (pp. 117-158). Dordrecht: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-3803-7_4.

Authors

• Douglas Kellner, University of California - Los Angeles

• Steve Gennaro, York University