| The argument that we are all cyborgs sensitises us to the bewildering smorgasbord of cyborgs we encounter in day-by-day life: a courier on a bicycle, a kid on a skateboard, a middle-aged man reading a book, a teenager carrying a boom-box, a cybernaut with goggles and gloves exploring cyberspace, and so on. Those are all temporary cyborgs who pick up and put down their appendices or, in the case when they wear their appendices, put them on and take them off. From time to time, someone advocates they be permanently implanted. Younger people, who have no qualms about tattoos and body piercing, may find this option of implanted intelligence interesting. Indeed, there seems to be no shortage of candidates with a 'desire to be wired' [Branwyn, 1993].
Whether worn or carried or implanted, the various appendices are of two types - those which expand the body as an energy system (bicycle and skateboard) and those which expand the body as an information system (book, boom-box, goggles-and-gloves). The former are of little theoretical interest. The bicycle and the skateboard are means of getting the person from point A to point B. If the trip is uneventful, the person is essentially unchanged at the destination. The latter are more interesting, since the person is changed by the acts of reading the book, listening to the music, exploring cyberspace. Let us focus, therefore, on the latter - on systems involving bits rather than atoms [Negroponte, 1996].
|
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 