Social + Mobile: Are we all Cyborgs now?

In our class on Moodle, Peggy mentioned that mobile devices are becoming quite common. Increasingly people are using social media networks like Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, foursquare, and so forth via smart phones or other web enabled protable devices.

This raises a question that some technology thinkers have been posing for a while now: are we all Cyborgs?


Robocop: not quite the cyborg I'm talking about.

Now I don't mean Robocop cyborgs here. Rather, consider the definition of a cyborg according to anthropologist Amber Case:

A cyborg has organic and nonorganic components that work together in a symbiotic relationship. Everyone is a cyborg. When you use a cell phone, you’re a not “full” cyborg, because the phone isn’t embedded in your body, but you’re a “low-tech cyborg”—the technology is an extension of the hand. A computer and a human work together symbiotically—a human stores things in a computer, and computers wouldn’t survive unless humans kept purchasing them.

I'm one of the more "wired" people I know, though by no means am I particularly exceptional. I don't own a smart phone for example, but I do have an iPad as a portable communication device and light office tool, as I am often out of the office, at meetings, or travelling for work. Social media integrates into mobile web devices in that I can maintain relationships with people across a broad geographic spectrum from nearly anywhere.

I don't think I'd want to be Robocop, though.

Read more about the new field of cyborg anthropology at Portland Monthly.