Post humanism, Cyborgs and Facebook

Retrieved from: http://darkecologies.com/2014/10/26/david-rodens-speculative-posthumanism-conclusion-part-8/

Facebook, as a social networking website, allows for people to transcend the physical limitations of their bodies to find new form and new identity online. It was said in a video that online personas have become part of our multiple selves. It is possible for an individual to form multiple personalities of themselves online, some representations of ourselves and some being false personas or avatars.

The representations of ourselves as they appear on Facebook are of our own construction and of the construction of those we interact with. With this interaction between individuals the lines between individual and group, as well as man and machine, begin to blur. This move beyond the boundaries of humanism is referred to as ‘post-humanism’.

As is stated by Van Luyn (2015) referencing Haraway, “These collapsed boundaries are represented in the figure of the cyborg.” It is not inaccurate to think of the cyborg as a physical representation of the move into post-humanism.

Mcneil (2012) refers to Facebook as a “machine-human coproduction” and as a “shadow biographer”. In other words Facebook is a melding of the human self and machine. Through the act of storing your statuses and other various uploads, such as pictures, Facebook preserves a representation of yourself. To many individuals Facebook becomes a simple extension of their own being, just as the individual becomes part of Facebook; the individual becomes, in essence, a cyborg. Indeed, with sites such as Facebook, there is a requirement to submit to the softwares imperatives Mcneil (2012).

To a degree, people lose a sense of individuality online. The ability of social networking sites such as Facebook, along with other people and other groups of people, to influence the identities we attempt to form for ourselves online erodes our own sense of individuality as a new cyborg-dominated, post-human world forms.

In the same video mentioned previously, “everything is connected”.


References:

Mcneil, L. (2012). There is no "I" in network: Social networking sites and post-human. Biography, 35(1), pp. 65-82. doi: 10.1353/bio.2012.0009

Post-human artistic expressionist art[image]. (2014). Retrieved from http://darkecologies.com/2014/10/26/david-rodens-speculative-posthumanism-conclusion-part-8/

Tedx Talks. (2013). Humans, cyborgs, posthumans: Francesca Ferrando at TEDxdilicon alley [video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGjMUw03Bv0

Van Luyn, A. (2015). BA1002: Networked narratives: Intertextuality[powerpoint slides]. Retrieved from https://learnjcu.jcu.edu.au