Week 10 - Are we human or are we dancers?

Please do not take my title seriously, it is an inside joke my friend and I made when we did this topic. 'Are we human or are we dancers?' is a song title by The Killers which asks us if we really are humans, or dancers who follow only 'choreographs' and cannot think for ourselves.

Completely different from what I am about to talk about. The real question should be; are we cyborgs?

I know I am.

I bet you're wearing clothes right now (at least I hope so). Is your smartphone anywhere near you? Are you using your laptop now?

We are living in the modern age where technology has become more than a commodity, rather it is  a necessity to our ways of life. we need cellphones to call people far away from us. We need television for entertainment, to watch the news, to be up to date with the Walking Dead. We need cameras to capture meaningful moments. I need this laptop to create this post for my Analyzing Visual Communication blog assignment.

How far can we go with technology?

Technology has become our constant companion since the birth of it. No doubt it has made our lives much more easier especially with the endless gadgets and the more advanced it will become, the more dependent we will be on it. We are humans but our unbeatable bond with technology makes us machine as well. We are therefore half-human and half-machine; cyborgs. The term 'cyborg' was coined in 1960. "A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of friction" (Haraway, 2000).

 By being cyborgs, we are able to explore with ourselves especially in cyberspace where our identities are not fixed, but created according to our desires and vision. Cyberspace is claimed to be, according to  guruesque William Gibson, a 'consensual hallucination'. Sherman and Judkins tell it as "truly technology of miracles and dreams". Virtual reality enables us to play God (Robin, 2000).

Users can bring life to identities that fulfull their 'ideal ego'. Thus people love to immerse themselves in this illusion of 'reality' because according to Krueger in Artificial Reality II:

"In the ultimate artificial reality, physical appearance will be completely composoble- It would be intrusive to see how changed physical attributes altered your interactions with other people. Not only might people treat you differently, but you might find yourself treating them differently as well."

Virtual allows you to release the 'real you'. We can see this in Maxis's famous game The Sims which was released in 2000. This life-stimulation game is highly addictive because users are able to control one or more virtual persons (Sims) through their daily lives. Other games include Skyrim (PS3), Second Life (Internet) and World of Warcraft (WoW by Blizzard) which have real-time settings to create that real-life feel for users and, as an addition, allows us to interact with other players. Through these games, communication is easy because we are communication with out 'ideal ego/self'.

 
So apart from phone calls, text-messagings, IMs and video-chats through social networks like Facebook, Skype and Messenger, we are able to communicate with each other through technology. Think about it, we can dial someone's number on the other side of the world and in a matter of seconds, he will pick up and say 'Hello'.
 
With the advances of technology, it could be possible to communicate without body. Like in the famous quote by Morpheus from  The Matrix; "the body cannot live without the mind". Meaning to say the body is just a medium or a vessel.

References:

Robins, K. (2000). Cyberspace and the world we live in. In Bell, D. and Kennedy, B.M. (eds.), The cybercultures reader (pp.77095). London: Routledge.

Fung, A. (2006). Bridging cyberlife and real life: A study of online communities in Hong Kong. In Silver, D.M. and Adrienne Steve, J. (eds.), Critical cyberculture studies (pp. 129-139). New York: New York University Press.