the notion of cyborg

Cyborg typically conjures of images of computerized humans or human-like computers, as with the borg on Star Trek: Next Generation or the cylons of Battlestar Galactica. The term was first used nearly 50 years ago in a application of systems theory to space exploration.

In my recent work with several colleagues on global teams in multinational organizations, I've become interested in how cyborg theory might help us understand how these teams work. With its roots in actor-network theory and Haraway's (1990) seminal work on technology and socialist feminist theory, cyborg theory links new communication technologies to the sociocultural, political, communicative, and physical experiences of those who use them (Franklin, 2002). Although often applied as a literal metaphor for the online representation of mechanized human bodies (e.g., DeVoss, 2000), Petersen’s (2007) research in the everyday use of the internet suggests a more abstract interpretation of the human cyborg--one in which the physicality of internet use has become deeply engrained in our daily routines. The result of the internet’s ubiquity is "the computer-internet-human actor becomes involved in coagency with these mundane artefacts and thereby bends space and restructures our physical setting" (Petersen, 2007, p. 88).

This view of how individuals use the internet has important implications for all aspects of communication, and certainly for organizational communication as computers and the internet become central to organizational functioning. Removing the novelty or newness typically associated with new communication technologies illuminates the taken-for-grantedness of internet communication in organizations and our everyday lives.

Consider the ways in which using internet communication, and other new communication technologies, has become routinized in your daily life. Do you ever turn off your cell phone? How often do you check for voice mail, text, and email messages? When you want to find directions to a location, do you consult a paper map or MapQuest? How have you made room for these technologies in your living and working space? Do you have a dedicated desk for your computer? A backpack to carry your laptop? How has the physical space of your local or campus library changed with the addition of computers and use of online databases?

Cyborg theory helps us examine how the "artificial" becomes part of the "natural" and the implications of integrating communication technologies into who we are and what we do.

-Prof. Cyborg

References

DeVoss, D. (2000). Rereading cyborg(?) women: The visual rhetoric of images of cyborg (and cyber) bodies on the world wide web. CyberPsychology & Behavior, 3, 835-845.

Franklin, M. I. (2002). Reading Walter Benjamin and Donna Haraway in the age of digital reproduction. Information, Communication & Society, 5, 591-624.

Haraway, D. (1990). A manifesto for cyborgs: Science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980s. In L. Nicholson (Ed.), Feminism/postmodernism (pp. 190-233). New York: Routledge.

Petersen, S. M. (2007). Mundane cyborg practice: Material aspects of broadband internet use. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 13, 79-91.