Sam Scaife - Digital Media Design BA

Initially I wanted to do do the completely separate project but after reading them a few timing I was really draw to the Donner Haraway quote,

"By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs"

This quote express a thought which I have had while doing the reading for me dissertation. Our increasing reliance on digital technologies is changing what it means to a human and it can be argued that we are or will soon be cyborgs.

A quote I picked up from my dissertation readings from a book titled Bioethics in the age of new media by Joanna Zylinska

""Organisms respond to their environment in ways determined by their internal self-organization. Their one and only goal is continually to produce and reproduce the organization that defines them as a system. hence, they not only are self-organizing but also are autopoietic or self-making... In a sense, autopoiesis turns the cybernetic paradigm inside out. It’s central premise - that systems are infomationally closed- radically alters the idea of information feedback loop, for the loop no longer functions to connect a system to its environment. in the autopoietic view, no information crosses the boundary separating the system from its environment. We do not see a world “out there” that exists apart from us. Rather, we see only what our systemic organizations allows us to see that environment merely triggers changes determined by the system’s own structural properties. Thus the center of interest for autopoiesis shifts from the cybernetics of the observed system to the cybernetics of the observer. Autopoiesis also changes the explanation of what circulates through the system to make it work as a system. The emphasis now is on the mutually constitutive interactions between the components of a system rather than on message, signals or information." (Katherine Hayles)"

what I like about this is the idea of the roles of observation, and the selfish self replicating existence which can not look beyond its means. Though this is missing the point and it's not at all doing so, I like the idea that digital technologies are extending our existence and allowing us to do things that we cannot do unaided.

The initial quote has also inspired me to go and read some more science fiction as they are concerned with cultures where technology or external situation have altered human experience.