Cyborgs: the Body, Information and Technology

Abstract

Science fiction makes it clear that the body is not what it used to be. The contemporary intersection of the body, information and technology gives us a different body from the somewhat fixed and frail, if valiant, body we were used to. One example of the changing cultural conception of the body is the notion of physical ‘disability’. Not so very long ago there was debate whether people whose bodies did not conform to the ‘norm’ should be labelled ‘disabled’ or ‘differently abled’ or even, of course, whether they should be labelled at all. The latter has won out. It is now clear that we are all ‘differently abled’. All of us require technical assistance and a society that adapts to the different needs of our bodies. In the old terms, we are all perhaps ‘disabled’ in the sense that we all rely on technological assistance in different ways, yet such reliance is obviously enabling as well. Chris Gray makes this clear in his extensive book covering these issues, Cyborg Citizen. Gray writes that ‘(dis)abled cyborgs’ are also ‘enabled cyborgs’ (p. 99). They

… certainly have their own political priorities, but on closer examination we see that they are not that different from the priorities of the rest of us. Almost all of us are cyborged in some way … (pp. 1–2).