Mediating the growing gap between technophobes and technophiles, Michael Ian Borer’s discussion of technology’s impact on culture and society offers readers a way of understanding the situated character of everyday life. Responding to, and building on posthumanist discourses, Borer offers up the "Cyborgian Self" as a critical concept through which we understand the dialectical processes at work in cultural life.

The Cyborgian Self: Toward a Critical Social Theory of Cyberspace [printable version]

Michael Ian Borer

The body must become a cyborg to retain its presence in the world, resituated in technological space and reconfigured in technological terms. Whether this represents a continuation, a sacrifice, a transcendence, or a surrender of "the subject" is not certain.

Scott Bukatman (1993, 247)

<1> Contemporary social theory currently remains at a virtual standstill, quivering over the decision to radically leave the past behind or to continue within the historical narrative of the Enlightenment. Postmodern social theorists, advocating the position that we have, in fact, entered a new historical epoch, pose serious challenges to our perception of modernity and cultural identity. As an influential strategy that has infiltrated both the humanities and the social sciences for more than thirty years, postmodernism can no longer be dismissed as merely a fad or trend. In a world where the use of complex, and often mobile, communication technologies have become the norm, questions concerning cultural identity, space, and time are at the forefront of interdisciplinary debates. Regardless of whether we have or have not crossed the "postmodern divide," we need an appropriate methodology for analyzing, conceptualizing, and theorizing the uses of contemporary technological products and their relationship to the construction of group and individual identities.

<2> The increased use of electronic media, from radio to television to the Internet, is an inseparable consequence of modernization (Giddens 1991, 24). Due to the intricate connection between culture and technology, it is imperative to attempt to comprehend the impact of electronic media on human social relations and self-identity. As such, we need a critical social theory that provides a dialectical optic in order to adjudicate between the utopian and dystopian visions of computer-mediated communication. Working toward such a perspective, I propose the concept of the cyborgian self as an effective category for understanding the interrelationship between technology and humanity. Such an idea gains greater importance as the Internet becomes more affordable and accessible. Other attempts to use "cyborg" terminology have often focused on physical syntheses between humans and machines, such as the use of prosthetics, declaring the arrival of "posthuman" cyborgs (Haraway, 1991; Mazlish, 1993; Stock, 1993; Gray, 2001). The concept of the cyborgian self can incorporate, but is not limited to, material human/technology hybrids. The cyborgian self, however, speaks to a more widespread notion of technology as a cultural phenomenon that both affects and is affected by social actors' actions, practices, and renderings of social reality. Adopting the notion of the cyborgian self, understood as both an anthropological condition and an analytical construct, can be valuable as we make efforts toward a sharper understanding of the intersubjective nature of electronic media and the construction of identities in the contemporary late modern era.

The Cyborgian Dialectic

<3> The necessary interrelationship between culture and technology is not a new phenomenon. As such, the presence of the cyborgian self in the contemporary late modern age is not a result of the popular assumption that we have crossed the "postmodern divide" [1]. Current trends in postmodern social theory, celebrating otherness, differance, alterity, and incommensurability, argue for the abandonment of the perennial ambitions and objectives within the "project of modernity" [2]. Postmodern advocates espouse the renunciation of the quest for unity, generality, reconciliation, and synthesis. Yet theories that endorse the implosion and blurring of the traditionally drawn boundaries between conventionally accepted dualisms are not necessarily postmodern (Latour, 1993). The rupture of traditional dualisms or the unity of binary opposites, the coincidentia oppositorum [3], is an essential element for the dialectical reconstruction of the modern project, especially if we intend to retain the Enlightenment ideal of hegemonic emancipation. Understanding the cyborgian self as a conceptual, dialectical synthesis of technology and humanity, we can reveal its potential as an effectual and analytical concept and adopt it as a means to a more cogent and appropriate optic for understanding the everyday uses of contemporary technologies. By recognizing that technology is an indispensable constituent of the modern world and by appropriating the concept of the cyborg as an ambivalent, value-neutral term, we can devise a more constructive critical social theory for deciphering the positive and negative, the liberating and enslaving, the egalitarian and the totalitarian, uses of modern electronic technologies.

<4> The cyborgian self is neither a revolutionary, messianic creature of science fiction nor a disembodied, dis-gendered synthetic persona wandering through cyberspace seeking salvation at the gates of cyberHeaven or interacting with other virtual selves in MUDs (Multiple Use Dimensions). Whether conceived of as a liberating vision of human evolution where the cyborg sheds it human limitations-the senses of the body, the emotions of the heart, and the ideologies of the power elite-or as an undesirable fictive entity who serves as a counterpoint to the desirable traits of being human, the cyborgian self is not merely or exclusively a character of artistic fantasy (Brasher 1996, 810). The cyborgian self is more than a physical synthesis of humanity and technology, like William Gibson's "spectacular" image of humans with cranial implants that predicate a material connection between person and computer (Gibson, 1984) [4]. Rather, it is used here as a construct to elucidate the interdependent relationship between humanity and technology. Brenda Brasher contends that the cyborg should receive serious academic attention, rather than simply as a fanciful literary aberration because

the infiltration of technology into daily life is transforming our patterns of play, work, love, birth, sickness, and death such that the cyborg is not an imaginative but a metaphor that is lived by. The cyborg is a term of and for our times which aptly maps contemporary bodily and social reality as a hybrid of biology and machine (Brasher 1996, 811).

The importance of accepting the reality of the cyborg is that the cyborgian self exists as a part of social reality, within our specific social, cultural and historical context and not merely as "a life on the screen " (Turkle, 1995) or within a "virtual community" (Rheingold, 1994). Theories, such as those espoused by both Turkle and Rheingold, that describe and interpret online social activity as if cyberspace were a radically "other" realm, tend to lose sight of the empirical fact that there are living, breathing human beings behind the "avatars" in cyberspace [5]. One's actions and practices, whether online or offline, are not wholly autonomous but are, consequently, part of our collectively lived and constructed social reality.

<5> Even though Turkle makes the point that computer-mediated virtuality and "real" life do not compete as arenas of interaction, she does, however, envision them as separate and distinct parallel worlds. She therefore maintains that there is a certain impermeability between the virtual and the real, affirming the idea, put forth by a MUD user whom she encountered during her research, that "RL [Real Life]" is merely "just another window" (Turkle 1995, 13). Rheingold similarly refers to "virtual communities" as self-defined [autonomous?] electronic networks. By creating this schematic of rigid borders between online and offline life, both Turkle and Rheingold extricate electronically-mediated interaction from the contextuality of historical time and space. Though cyberspace is not a physical environment, the people that allow it to exist, not by power but by participation, are material beings. Cyberspace must thereby be understood as an intersubjective construction of cyborgian selves. If technology is, in effect, an extension of our anthropology (McLuhan, 1964), then it is intricately related to human social behavior, regardless of it use or purpose. As such, technology cannot be extricated from humanity as an independent entity.

<6> There are two unfortunate consequences when making sharp differentiations between cyberspace and lived reality. First, by occluding the virtual from the realm of natural, social reality, one diminishes the very "real" effects one's experience online can have on Internet users. Not only are privacy and security issues prevalent in cyberspace in regard to what information one retrieves from and inputs into the Internet [6], but there have been a number of incidents of sexual harassment or "cyberrape," leading to real life depression and insecurity (Jordan 1999, 103-10). Contrary to the utopian speculations about an open "arena" where individuals are dis-gendered (Haraway, 1991) and anonymous, identities do not disappear in cyberspace, they are merely reconstructed.

People are not anonymous in cyberspace, as they construct identities that they use there. What can be anonymous is the identity they use in their day-to-day non-virtual lives. What can be reinvented or left behind are the clues that everyone gains from seeing each other -- race, age, sex, dress sense and so on -- in favor of the words scrolling across the screen (Jordan 1999, 75).

Due to the ability to have multiple avatars in cyberspace, Turkle, drawing extensively from the ideas of Jacques Lacan, argues that we have moved into a postmodern epoch where the once proposed Kantian unitary ego is rejected because we are actually composed of multiple selves. According to Turkle, the experience of the self as different personae through the exploration and experimentation of online roles and identities is, in turn, the experience of many selves or aspects of selves within us. Hence, Turkle, following Lacan, asserts that "the ego is an illusion. In this [Lacan] joins psychoanalysis to the postmodern attempt to portray the self as a realm of discourse rather than as a real thing or a permanent structure of the self" (Turkle 1995, 178).

<7> As a proof of postmodernity, Turkle's appropriation of Lacan is insufficient. There is nothing postmodern about this interpretation of the self for two reasons. First, the proposition of identity fluidity is evident in the work of modern theorists, including Hegel, Simmel, Mead, and Goffman. Second, like other elements involved in postmodern theorizing, such as cultural fragmentation or the collapse of high/low culture distinctions, they are a result of the processes of modernization and are thereby merely extensions of the modern project. "Postmodernism is a symptom, not a fresh solution....It senses that something has gone awry in the modern critique, but it is not able to do anything but prolong that critique, though without believing in its foundations" (Latour, 1993). There is nothing "post" about recent technological and social changes. At best, we can concede that we are in an advanced or late modern period [7]. Postmodernism is probably best understood as a social movement in itself, rather than as a useful social theory for understanding the salient aspects of contemporary social life and, in turn, the cyborgian condition (i.e. the interaction of technology and humanity).

<8> The cyborgian self, as a value-absent concept, is closer to Marshall McLuhan's abstractions about the role of electronic media as an extension of human senses than to Donna Haraway's exceedingly optimistic and utopian image of the cyborg. What ultimately separates McLuhan and Haraway is the direction of their gaze, their point of view, past versus future. In regard to what Arthur Kroker calls McLuhan's "technological humanism," Kroker writes:

In much the same way, but with a different purpose, McLuhan was a practitioner of Northrop Frye's "improved binoculars." Like his favorite symbolist poets, Poe, Joyce, Eliot, and Baudelaire, McLuhan always worked backwards from effects to cause. Much like the models of the detective and the artist, he wished to perfect the method of "suspended judgement" in the technique of discovery itself, a new angle of vision on technological experience (1997, 97).

McLuhan's strategy, utilizing "improved binoculars" and "suspended judgment" (McLuhan 1967, 69), intends to see through the seductive effects of technology, to disrupt the hypnotic, numbing allure of electronic media, to deconstruct what Herbert Marcuse calls "the technological veil [that] conceals the reproduction of inequality and enslavement" (Marcuse 1964, 32) [8].

<9> McLuhan's approach to understanding the interrelationship of technology and humanity is comparable to Marcuse. Both McLuhan's and Marcuse's dissection of modern technology is neither dystopian nor pessimistic. Unlike many neo-Luddite postmodernists and "glass-is-half-empty" cultural critics, McLuhan and Marcuse are able acknowledge the possibility for harmony, rather than conflict, between humanity and nature through the realization of new, progressive techniques and attitudes fostered by technological innovation. Writing well before the advent of and mass participation in cyberspace, Marcuse, as well as McLuhan, conjectured that the "cyborgian self" could learn to achieve its emancipatory aims by recognizing nature's potentialities "instead of laying it to waste in the interest of narrow short-term goals such as power and profit" (Feenberg 1996, 47). This harmony between culture and nature can be achieved through the application of electronic media that, according to McLuhan, function as extensions of our senses, creating a "sensory balance" between the internal and the external (McLuhan, 1964).

<10> In true cyborgian fashion, both Marcuse and McLuhan were aware of the extent that technology substantially affects everyday social behavior and human consciousness. What sets McLuhan's philosophy of technology apart from Marcuse and others is its radical elimination of the boundaries between technology and biology, consequently averting any degree of technological determinism. His approach is effective because it does not attempt to present technology as autonomous nor ahistorical. By doing this, he keeps the necessary social quality of technology intact. Though Haraway correctly asserts that "cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves" (1991, 177), her thoroughly utopian science fiction is otiose as an analytical resource.

<11> Haraway conceives of the cyborg as a "cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction" (1991, 181). Rendering the cyborg as a hybrid implies that humanity and technology function independently of each other. To say that technology exists apart from human beings is nonsensical. Arising from within a culture, technology, whether it is a canoe, a revolver, or a clock, simultaneously shapes and reshapes the culture in which it exists. "Physiologically, man in the normal use of technology (or his variously extended body) is perpetually modified by it and in turn finds ways of modifying his technology" (McLuhan 1964, 46). In accord with McLuhan's division of human history into three major epochs (oral, writing/printing, and electronic), I contend that part of what sets cultures apart from each other are their divergent appropriations and interactions with different technologies which may or may not shift beyond their originally intended instrumental designs. The cyborgian self can, therefore, be understood as a universal attribute while maintaining the ability to differentiate cultural particularity and specificity. It can be used to describe and interpret the ways in which each culture, within its specific socio-historical context, uses and adapts their constitutive technological facilities.

Cyberspace, or The "Interactive Spectacle"

<12> The Internet is commonly recognized as somewhat of a metaphysical filing cabinet of information. What is too often neglected is the acknowledgment that the information that exists in cyberspace could not exist independently from the acts of human beings who input, access, and share information. Postmodern analyses of cyberspace and contemporary electronic communication assume that the subject is eliminated in the de-centered world of virtuality. Though I agree that cyberspace is a de-centralized environment since there is no central authority that regulates the flow of information (attempts to censor or restrict access to certain domains can simply be bypassed, allowing unrestricted access to online information), cyberspace still needs, and depends, on social actors. While it is true that cyberspace lacks a physical location beyond our computer monitors and keyboards, it can still have a substantial impact on human social interaction and self-identity. "Society" has no specific physical location, but it certainly affects our worldviews. Trying to delineate the location of cyberspace, merely mimics the classic philosophical/sociological riddle: "Where is Society?"

<13> The uncertainty of spatial temporality in cyberspace, with its overwhelming flow of information, may contribute to what Frederic Jameson has described as the "depthlessness" of the postmodern condition (Jameson, 1984), what McLuhan calls the electronic "Age of Anxiety" (McLuhan 1964, 32), or a feeling of "information overload" (Jordan 1999, 117) [9]. It may, however, also provide individuals with a sense of freedom, liberation, community, and pride. It affords opportunities for users to resist passive television watching and becomes active producers of entertainment, artwork, business ventures, grassroots politics, and new religious movements.

<14> Cyberspace is an unusually difficult technological phenomenon to describe because it functions as a medium for information and communication and as a domain of information and communication. In this sense, cyberspace is akin to Clifford Geertz's idea of a symbolic cultural system that serves as both a model of and model for human social reality (1973, 93). Cyberspace is a multifarious "spectacle" that should not merely be viewed instrumentally since it is more than just another instrument or tool. Though it can be understood, in part, as an instrument, such as when individuals use e-mail as a more efficient alternative to the Post Office or the fax machine or create websites to promote various ideologies and commodities (from socialist-feminism to the Church of the SubGenius, from electronic auctions to on-line shopping malls), cyberspace constitutes a transient electronic environment of information flows and mediated communication [10].

<15> Mark Poster insists that "the Internet is more like a social space than a thing so that its effects are more like those of Germany than those of hammers" (Poster 1996, 206). While this may be a more appropriate way to think about cyberspace, rather than reducing it to the likes of a hammer, the use of hammers changes social reality as well. Who has access to the hammer(s) partially determines the division of labor, and consequently, the entire social structure and rank of power, which are necessary constituents of any, and all, societies (even "virtual communities"). Poster, like Turkle and other postmodern social theorists, exaggerates the sociality of cyberspace and the interactivity between the "virtual" and the "real." This leads postmodernists to conclude that face-to-face interaction has become obsolete, assuming that we have transgressed modernity by fully submerging into the virtual, the inauthentic, the simulated.

<16> The leading postmodern social theorist of the "hyperreal" world of communication, a world molded by the new electronic media into a world of pure simulacra, is Jean Baudrillard. Baudrillard depicts, though more likely creates, a world embodied by an extremely heightened level of abstraction. Accordingly, he postulates that we have broken away from modernity, into an epoch where there no longer remains any mission to find authenticity since truth has been trumped by the veil of the image. The image is all that exists, along with other images of images -- copies of copies. According to Baudrillard, all our possible resources that we think we can adopt to redeem authenticity are illusions or abstract simulations, far removed from the original object, or subject, that they once simulated. Baudrillard writes:

Whereas representation attempts to absorb simulation by interpreting it as false representation, simulation envelops the whole edifice of representation itself as a simulacrum. Such would be the successive phases of the image:
it is the reflection of a profound reality;
it masks and denatures a profound reality;
it masks the absence of a profound reality;
it has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum (1995, 6).

Baudrillard assumes that we have already transformed social reality into a "brave new world" of hyperreality and simulation because we have been satiated by the luxuries of technology and the "ecstasy of communication" (1983). His social theory seems to apply more to the world of Gibson's "cyberpunk" science fiction than to our actual lived reality. If social reality existed in the fashion depicted by both Baudrillard and Gibson, then, as Douglas Kellner remarks, "such a universe would deserve being described in terms of a postmodern rupture and would constitute a genuine break in history" (1995, 314) [11].

<17> In Gibson's seminal "cyberpunk" text Neuromancer, Gibson provides a definition of cyberspace, effectually coining the term (in 1984). The main character of the novel, Case, who is described as a "computer cowboy" (a prophetic reference to the electronic frontier [12]), is presented with a history of cyberspace:

"The matrix has its roots in primitive arcade games," said the voice over, "in early graphic programs and military experimentation with cranial jacks....Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children behind taught mathematical concepts....A graphic representation of the data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding" (Gibson 1984, 51).

Defining cyberspace as a "consensual hallucination" is inadequate for describing the real life domain we commonly refer to as cyberspace. Kellner contends that Gibson's definition is "somewhat misleading" because cyberspace involves "the current and real phenomena of the present moment....[Modern electronic media] are neither hallucinatory, nor subjective, but are simply the spaces and networks of a high-tech, media society" (Kellner 1995, 309). What can be salvaged or retained from Gibson's definition, however, is the understanding of cyberspace as "consensual." Consensual, as I see it, can be analogous to intersubjective. As such, Gibson apparently understood that cyberspace could not exist without the intersubjective/consensual participation and presence of "real" social actors.

<18> In the wake of postmodernism, cyberspace may seem like a vast uncharted, un-colonized, frontier, open to radically new potentialities of social and historical fragmentation and dispersal marked by virtual images and self-constructed avatars. Undoubtedly, the visual images presented to the "virtual pilgrim" [13] create multiple textures and narratives that were previously unavailable through oral or printed communication. In awe of this relatively new multimedia "spectacle" that, in effect, reestablishes the pre-modern harmony of the senses (McLuhan, 1964) through the use of video, audio, and hypertext, manipulated by a touch of the mouse or a stroke of the keyboard (though the "virtual palate" has yet to be administered), both the postmodern technophiles and technophobes presume the autonomy of the Internet. They fall into the trap of reification, envisioning cyberspace as an object unto itself, a self-relational and self-supported realm of de-humanized hyperreality. Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, adopting Marx's idea of reification originally used in congruence with "the fetishism of commodities" (Marx, 1938), describe the act of reification as

the apprehension of human phenomena as if they were things, that is, in non-human or possibly suprahuman terms...reification is the apprehension of the products of human activity as if they were something else than human products-such as facts of nature, results of cosmic laws, or manifestations of divine will. Reification implies that man is capable of forgetting his own authorship of the human world, and further, that the dialectic between man, the producer, and his products is lost to consciousness. The reified world is, by definition, a de-humanized world. It is experienced as a strange facticity, an opus alienum over which he has no control rather than the opus proprium of his own productive activity (Berger and Luckmann, 1966, 89).

The reification of cyberspace renders it as a radical other, an objective, de-centered postmodern domain that, on its own, ennobles instability and "incredulity toward metanarratives" (Lyotard 1984, xxiv). Such a misunderstanding leads some, like Turkle, Haraway, and Baudrillard, to believe that, for better or for worse, cyberspace, as an other-than-human entity, has the capability to independently revolt and dominate humanity. Technology, like culture, as a part of culture, cannot act independent of human intervention and facilitation. Alarm clocks, automobiles, machine guns, and computers work because we make them work, whether it is by turning the ignition or installing programs on the hard drive. This interactivity embodies the quintessential character of the cyborgian self.

<19> Postmodern theorists of cyberspace who reify and subsequently valorize cyberspace, presenting it as an extra-ordinary, asocial sacred object, are themselves examples of those mesmerized by the "spectacle." What they claim to see as total liberation in cyberspace, may, in actuality, be closer to escapism or passive enslavement. Prior to the emergence of the cyberspectacle, Guy Debord claimed that "wherever representation takes on an independent existence, the spectacle reestablishes its rule" (1994, 17, #18). The spectacle is "the autonomous movement of the non-living" (Debord 1994, 12, #2). Though the multi-vocal spectacle spawned by the Internet is not as unilateral as the spectacle of the "culture industries" (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1972), Debord's critique of the spectacle is conducive for interpreting the contemporary advanced stage of the cyborgian self. As such, Steve Best and Douglas Kellner argue

that we are in a more advanced stage of the spectacle [than the period in which Debord developed his analysis], which we call the interactive spectacle, that involves the creation of cultural space and forms which present exciting possibilities for creativity and empowerment of individuals, as well as novel forms of seduction and domination (Best and Kellner, 1999).

The "interactive spectacle" affords a greater opportunity for active participation than did the previous period of the passive TV watcher. Though the indolence and submissiveness of the TV audience should not be overstated, there is a clear difference between watching and participating, as well as the perceived greater value of the latter. The mass popularity of "everyday" people-participation "realty" TV programs, ranging from America's Funniest Home Videos to The Real World to Survivor, as well as personal webpages and "Webcam" sites, clearly demonstrates the willingness and appeal of social actors becoming a part of the public spectacle [14]. Whether participation in the "interactive spectacle" represents a greater or lesser degree of "cyborgianness" will need to be fleshed out in future studies.

<20> With what seems to be a more egalitarian environment, where people are encouraged to produce their own information, rather than passively consume broadcasted material via the radio, television, or written text, cyberspace becomes an increasingly accessible and affordable medium. The blurring of high and low culture in cyberspace, however, leads to questions concerning the legitimacy and authenticity of the information being shared in cyberspace. This impacts both academic standards (anyone can "publish" anything about anything) and religious integrity (for better or worse, one's personal beliefs now can be publicly displayed, reaching an essentially indefinable audience, with the possibility of unintended consequences [15]). The interactive spectacle, consummated by the information flow through cyberspace, can provide a voice for the previously silenced, the "invisible" people perpetually marginalized by the dominant culture, while simultaneously becoming an overwhelming, daunting cacophony of dissonant voices.

Self-Identity and Cyberspace

<21> McLuhan's genealogy of mediated experience tracks the interrelationship of technology and human consciousness. McLuhan's historical interpretation is predicated on his conviction that "all media work us over completely....Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without knowledge of the way media work as environments" (1967, 26). He depicts a lineage from the pre-modern "ear culture" of simultaneity and circularity to the world of writing, and to a greater degree, the printed word of the "Gutenberg Galaxy," where humans began to think linearly (McLuhan, 1962). Accordingly, McLuhan interprets a collective mass migration "from the circular world of sound with its round huts and round villages...toward linear, cause-and-effect thinking, grid-like cities, and a one-thing-at-a-time and one-thing-after-another world that mimics the linear lines of writing and type" (Meyrowitz 1985, 17). Electronic media have, in part, trumped the communicative modes of the past, creating a new environment for social interaction that impact our conceptions of social and personal identity. The "global village" (McLuhan and Powers, 1989) instigated by the influx (or invasion) of electronic media, and even more so by cyberspace, due to its lack of centralized authority and geographical boundaries, needs to be critically assessed in order to properly delineate the contemporary manifestations of the cyborgian self.

<22> The cyborgian self, as I have attempted to establish the phrase, dually functions as a value-free analytical concept and as an anthropological condition. As such, I maintain that an understanding of the cyborgian self, as the incarnation of a non-physical, dialectical synthesis between humanity and technology, can lead to a greater awareness of the influence of mediated experience on self-identity and the intersubjective nature of human interaction. In the midst of an appropriate critical social theory, the cyborgian self help distinguish the relationship between different cultures and their divergent appropriations of their contextually specific media.

<23> Modernity, which has not come to a halt but is, rather, in an advanced stage, is inseparable from the establishment of printed text and, subsequently, electronic media. As noted earlier, Baudrillard declares that the new electronic media have generated a world of pure simulacra, marked by the unprecedented takeover of the "real" by the image. Jean-Francois Lyotard might add that the proliferation of divergent images, presented on television and through cyberspace, promulgate the postmodern rejection of all totalizing concepts, repudiating all attempts and constructs that forge order and sense out of the flux of multiple and discontinuous events and text (Lyotard, 1984).

<24> Against the postmodern submission to, or acceptance of, "narratological" fragmentation, Anthony Giddens argues that the juxtaposition of narratives that may lack an obvious or direct connection does not necessarily warrant the demise of a unifying metanarrative. Instead, there exists a resultant collage effect:

Does this effect mark the disappearance of narratives and even perhaps the severance of signs from their referent, as some have suggested [e.g., Lyotard, Baudrillard]? Surely not. A collage is by definition not a narrative; but the coexistence of different items in mass media does not represent a chaotic jumble of signs. Rather, the separate "stories" which are displayed alongside one another express ordering of the consequentiality typical of a transformed time-space environment from which the hold of place has largely evaporated. They do not, of course, add up to a single narrative, but they depend on, and also in some ways express, unities of thought and consciousness (Giddens 1991, 26).

The information flow in cyberspace can be rendered, collectively, as a dynamic collage effect. While lacking a definitive or substantive center, without a "there" there, every part of cyberspace is invariably linked to every other part. This creates a massive collage, a contingently constructed "dynamic referencing system in which all texts are interrelated. Hypertext is no less than electronic intertextuality, the text of all texts, a supertext" (Heim 1998, 30).

<25> Giddens continues by explaining what he interprets as the second major feature of mediated experience in the modern epoch: the intrusion of distant events in everyday consciousness. Electronic media have the capabilities to transverse conventional geographical borders, presenting an abundance of remote objects and events that familiarize individuals with activities outside of their everyday lives.

Moreover, many experiences that might be rare in day-to-day life (such as direct contact with death and dying) are encountered routinely in media representations; confrontation with the real phenomena themselves is psychologically problematic....Late modernity produces a situation in which humankind in some respects becomes a "we," facing problems and opportunities where there are no "others" (Giddens 1991, 27).

The "we" envisaged by Giddens should be recognized as a product of global enculturation or cultural globalization, rather than political or economic globalization. The cultural globalization of late modernity, stimulated by electronic media, is a crucial element for discerning the impact of electronic communication and information sharing on the construction of social and personal identity in the twenty-first century. This begs questions concerning the development of a global cyborgian condition.

<26> While exposure to previously inaccessible "cultural resources" undoubtedly impacts one's perception of, and relation to, the external world, the construction of a global community should neither be presumed nor overstated. The assumption that all local cultural particularities have an equal voice and influence on the global scale implies the existence of a mode of consensual, undistorted communication akin to Habermas's "ideal speech situation" (1974, 1984). While one's political objectives may support such an idea, it can only retain the status of a goal or an ideal because it has yet to develop into an existing universal element of our collective social reality. This becomes evident once we address the transcultural popularity (or commodified domination) of American cultural artifacts transmitted through television programs and advertising, music, movies, and cyberspace (Kellner, 1995). The overwhelming presence across the globe of American commodities, such as McDonald's, Coca-Cola, and virtual celebrity worship sites (Brasher 2001, 120-39) has led to an "Americanized" international consumer culture (Featherstone, 1991, 1995; Ritzer, 2000). This begs questions concerning the development of a globally "Americanized" cyborgian condition.

<27> Even though increased sensitivity toward difference may not be "preordained," exposure to the "other" through either face-to-face interaction or through the cross-cultural media exchange of images undoubtedly impacts individual self-identity (Featherstone 1995, 86). As such, the construction of personal identity becomes an increasingly complex project. How does the "intertexuality," the collage effect, of electronic media impact the project of self-constitution? There is, by no means, a simple answer. Further theoretically informed empirical research and empirically based theoretical approaches are necessary to elucidate such questions.

<28> As I have argued throughout, there is an intersubjective interrelationship between humanity and technology that can be described, on the micro level, as the "cyborgian self." This argument is compatible with the understanding of the self as both a product and producer of social reality (i.e. the self is constructed and maintained through the social construction of reality) [16]. In opposition to approaches that valorize either relativism or universalism as their guiding principle, I maintain that adopting the concept of the cyborgian self allows for a dialectical position that transcends a simplistic middle way between the "boosters" and the "knockers" of modernity and its technological advances (Taylor, 1991). The cyborgian self is a relational model of the self, and culture, predicated on the universal imperative of human interdependence. By adopting the concept of the cyborgian self, we acknowledge the import of social interactions between people and other people, as well as between people and the material objects that help create and are created from their physical surroundings.

<29> Human interdependence is a necessary fact of social reality and a necessary element for the constitution of self-consciousness and self-identity. The process of acquiring a self is coextensive with the socialization of a child (Mead, 1934). In this combined process, the child is presented with a picture of reality, a worldview that provides meaning and order to reality. As such, the individual is able to locate one's self within that symbolic order. The construction of worldviews and symbolic meaning systems is possible because human beings transcend biology by becoming self-aware and are able to reflect on their experience (Luckmann, 1967).

<30> Becoming a self is not merely a matter of being given a "thing" by one's environment; self-identity, according to Giddens, is "something that has to be routinely created and sustained in the reflexive activities of the individual....It is the self as reflexively understood by the person in terms of her or his biography" (1991, 52-3). Understanding the constitution of the self in regard to its relation to "biography," rather than "autobiography," moves the agenda from an atomized, subjective human agency toward an understanding of intersubjectivity. We become self-aware when we become aware of others, with whom we must interact with in order to survive. Moreover, the self can only become a self through the interaction with, and responsiveness of, others. Jean-Paul Sartre argues a similar point in Being and Nothingness (1956): Sartre proclaims that we achieve consciousness of our self only when we become conscious that other conscious beings are conscious of us. Without the experience of being an object/subject to another, there is no basis on which one can become aware of one's self (Sartre 1956).

<31> Because the self cannot exist without others or its incumbent social matrix, no individual can be absent from his or her historical or cultural narratives. Marx rightly argued that humans "make their own history but they do not do so just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given, and transmitted from the past" (1977, 300). Even if the dominant social narrative of a culture changes, it is in the same manner that one's self can change when exposed to new perspectives, ideas, or technologies. This does not constitute a break from history, but merely a reconstruction or transformation of humanity's historical narrative. Modernity, appropriated differently by different cultures, is, in itself, flexible, unpredictable, and fluid. Therefore, the assumption that we have broken away from, or out of, modernity, and have migrated into a postmodern era is nonsensical. The project of modernity has continually been, and must continue to be, a project of reconstruction.

<32> Fragmenting our selves from history, as the postmodern theories of Baudrillard and Lyotard, among others, seem to support, only trivializes human interaction and human interdependence. Like other critics of contemporary social life who oppose the egocentric, atomized individualism that came to fruition in the United States during the "Me Decade" of the 1970s and the "Decade of Greed" of the 1980s, Charles Taylor proclaims that a self-fulfillment-based individualism "has taken trivialized and self-indulgent forms" that "have led many people to lose sight of concerns that transcend them" (Taylor 1991, 15). Recognizing the intersubjective nature of the self, Taylor writes:

I can define myself only against the background of things that matter. But to bracket out history, nature, society, the demands of solidarity, everything but what I find in myself, would be to eliminate all candidates for what matters. Only if I exist in a world in which history, or the demands of nature, or the needs of my fellow human beings, or the duties of citizenship, or the call of God, or something else of this order matters crucially, can I define an identity for myself that is not trivial. Authenticity is not the enemy of demands that emanate from beyond the self; it supposes such demands (1991, 40-1).

Accordingly, the self is dependent on others, both directly and indirectly. With the influx of electronically mediated communication, the self, the cyborgian self, is exposed to a greater variety and quantity of others. As noted earlier, these new experiences with a new, divergent array of personalities, perpetually impact self-identify in the late modern age. Only by means of a critical social theory, that incorporates an understanding of the relationality of the self, the hybridity of humanity and technology, and the intersubjectivity of social space, can we begin to adjudicate the positive and negative attributes of cyberspace.

Conclusion

<33> A relational model of the self, and consequently a relational model of the cyborgian self, provides a platform for understanding the connections between culture, technology, space, and identity. Once we understand the interplay between the construction of culture (with regards to both ideas and material objects) and the construction of social and personal identities, we can gain a better perspective on the relationship between technology and humanity. Assuming that we are mere reflections of our culture is surely incorrect. Neither culture nor identity is so closed, fixed, or static that either can be a reflection of the other. Cultural space is both the product and producer of cultural identities. Technology, as both a cultural resource and product, thereby profoundly impacts human behavior and consciousness. As such, the ongoing interactivity between humanity and technology affects the production and reconstruction of both group and individual identities. This interplay is the essential quality of the cyborgian condition.

<34> Adopting the cyborgian self as a component of a critical social theory allows us to transcend and transverse the "either/or" logic of technophobes and technophiles, as well as the "either/or" logic of the modernity/postmodernity debate. Following Richard Bernstein and Douglas Kellner, I endorse a "both/and" dialectical reconciliation as a more appropriate method for interpreting the "new constellation" of the late modern era that cannot be reduced to a single common denominator (Bernstein, 1991; Kellner, 1995). As we work toward a proper dialectical optic for understanding contemporary social change in regard to the impact of electronic media, the idea of the cyborgian self can help elucidate the contingent interrelationship between humanity, technology, and self-identity.

Notes

[1] For a discussion that affirmatively argues that we have entered a new postmodern era see (Borgman, 1992), as well as the divergent works of Jean Baudrillard, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and Paul Virilio. [^]

[2] This is Jurgen Habermas's term for the Enlightenment project, devised with reference to the ideals of progress, reason, and emancipation., see Habermas (1983). It should be noted, however, the Habermas is not a sterile defender of modernity. Though there are flaws in Habermas's schematic (e.g. his assumptions that his democratic ideals are universal), his work is best understood as a dialectical proposition, resting between the extremes of modernity and postmodernity, attempting to reconstruct, but not abandon, modernity's incomplete project. [^]

[3] This term is used by Mircea Eliade, appropriated from the fifteenth century thinker, Nicholas of Cusa. On this concept, see Rennie (1996). [^]

[4] There is, however, a bit of reality to this reference. As Tim Jordan notes: "Benign cyborgs surround us....How many people have artificial hips, pacemakers, or newly implanted corneas? Nearly every day seems to bring a new cyborg that corrects some human deficiency" (1999, 201). [^]

[5] "Avatar," originally a Sanskrit term that refers to the descent of a deity to earth and its incarnation in human or animal form, is the commonly appropriated term used to depict one's online identity. One's avatar can be a graphical representation, a log-in name, an e-mail address, or a number of other possibilities in cyberspace. Since individuals can create multiple avatar, the relationship between one's online and offline personalities becomes quite problematic. [^]

[6] Internet privacy continue to be a pressing issue for various types of Internet users (e.g. chat room participants, website managers, online shoppers). This becomes increasingly frightening once we recognize that over two thirds of European and American websites have failed to comply with international privacy protection standards. See "Consumer sites fail to protect personal data," Nua Internet Surveys (consulted April 2001). For a discussion on the fear of an increasing lack of privacy underneath the eye of the electronic "Superpanopticon" see Poster (1995). [^]

[7] This point is effectively made by Jurgen Habermas (1987), Anthony Giddens (1990, 1991, 1994), and Scott Lash (1990). [^]

[8] Marcuse explains: "With technical progress as its instrument, unfreedom -- in the sense of man's subjection to his productive apparatus -- is perpetuated and intensified in the form of many liberties and comforts. The novel feature is the overwhelming rationality in this irrational enterprise, and the depth of the preconditioning which shapes the instinctual drives and aspirations of the individuals and obscures the difference between false and true consciousness" (1964, 32). [^]

[9] The cyberworld of information is often depicted as the world of too much information. "In two surveys, 25.5 percent of those who used the system 10-49 hours per week felt overloaded always or almost always, while 48.5 percent of people felt overloaded sometimes. Taken together these results mean that 74 percent of people felt overloaded at least sometimes" (Jordan 1999, 117). [^]

[10] For an interesting collection of virtual maps of cyberspace see http://www.cybergeography.com. [^]

[11] Kellner presents a comparison between Baudrillard and Gibson, concluding that the work of both can be classified as social theory and as science fiction. [^]

[12] For a detailed examination of the nine "myths of the electronic frontier" see Jordon, 2000. [^]

[13] See James Slevin's adaptation of Zygmunt Bauman's "postmodern identities" (the stroller, the vagabond, the tourist, and the player), interpreting how each might experience cyberspace (2000, 162-66). [^]

[14] While Best and Kellner argue that "'hypodermic needle' models that assume [spectators] are merely injected with ideology" are too simplistic, they note that "Internet technology enables ordinary individuals to make their everyday life a spectacle, with live sex on the Internet (usually for a fee) and even a live birth on June 16, 1998....These sites seem to be highly addictive, pointing to deep-seated voyeurism and narcissism in the society of the interactive spectacle in which individuals have a seemingly insatiable lust to become part of the spectacle and to involve oneself in it more intimately" (1999). [^]

[15] "The hundreds and thousands of hours invested in building and maintaining celebrity altar sites suggest that something more than sheer frivolity is involved. Further, even when a Web designer launches a 'tongue-in-cheek' celebrity worship site, there is no guarantee that those who access it will respond as the designer intended. One person's joke can become another's sacred story-as the history of religions repeatedly attests....Today no less than in the medieval era, the question of who is authorized to tell stories about particular people is a matter of public concern, debate and sanction" (Brasher 2000, 122-23). [^]

[16] The idea of "social construction" (which comes from Berger and Luckmann's synthesis of Marx, Durkheim, Weber) is a useful tool for deconstructing the assumed "givenness" of accepted, dominant ideologies and social norms. For a recent analysis of the use of "social construction" terminology see Hacking (1999). [^]

Works Cited

Adorno, Theodor W. and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment. New York: Herder and Herder, 1972.

Baudrillard, Jean. "The Ecstasy of Communication." The Anti-Aesthetic. Hal Foster, ed. London: Pluto, 1983.

---. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1995.

Berger, Peter L. and Thomas Luckmann. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge, New York: Doubleday, 1967.

Bernstein, Richard J. The New Constellation: The Ethical-Political Horizons of Modernity/Postmodernity. Cambridge: MIT, 1992.

Best, Steve and Douglas Kellner. "DeBord, Cybersituations, and the Interactive Spectacle." Illuminations,
http://www.uta.edu/huma/illuminations/best6.htm, 1996.

Borgman, Albert. Crossing the Postmodern Divide. Chicago: The University of Chicago, 1992.

Brasher, Brenda E. "Thoughts on the Status of the Cyborg: On Technological Socialization and its Link to
the Religious Function of Popular Culture." Journal of the American Academy of Religion, LXIV 4 (1996): 809-830.

---. Give Me That Online Religion. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2001.

Bukatman, Scott. Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Post-Modern Science Fiction. Durham, NC: Duke University, 1993.

Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone Books, 1994.

Featherstone, Mike. Consumer Culture and Postmodernism. London: Sage, 1991.

---. Undoing Culture: Globalization, Postmodernism, and Identity. London: Sage, 1995.

Feenberg, Andrew. "Marcuse or Habermas: Two Critiques of Technology." Inquiry 39 (1996):45-70.

Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, 1973.

Gibson, William, Neuromancer. New York: Dell, 1984.

Giddens, Anthony. The Consequences of Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University, 1990.

---. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Stanford: Stanford University, 1991.

---. "Living a Post-Traditional Society." Reflexive Modernization. Ulrich Beck et al, ed. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994.

Gray, Chris Hables. Cyborg Citizen: Politics in the Posthuman Age. New York: Routledge, 2001.

Habermas, Jurgen. Communication and the Evolution of Society. Boston: Beacon Press, 1974.

---. "Modernity -- An Incomplete Project." The Anti-Aesthetic. Hal Foster, ed. London: Pluto Press, 1983.

---. The Philosophical Discourses of Modernity. Cambridge: MIT, 1987.

Hacking, Ian. The Social Construction of What? Cambridge: Harvard University, 1999.

Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991.

Heim, Michael. Virtual Realism. New York: Oxford University, 1998.

Jameson, Frederic. "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," New Left Review 146
(July-August 1984): 53-92.

Jordan, Tim. Cyberpower: The Culture and Politics of Cyberspace and the Internet. New York: Routledge, 1999.

Kroker, Arthur. "Digital Humanism: The Processed World of Marshall McLuhan." Digital Delerium. Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, eds. New York: St. Martin's, 1997.

Lash, Scott. Sociology of Postmodernism. London: Routledge, 1990.

Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambrige: Harvard University, 1993.

Lifton, Robert Jay. The Protean Self: Human Resilience in an Age of Fragmentation. New York: Basic Books, 1993.

Luckmann, Thomas. The Invisible Religion. New York: Macmillan, 1967.

Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minnesota: University of Minnesota, 1984.

Kellner, Douglas. Media Culture: Cultural Studies, Identity, and Politics Between the Modern and the Postmodern. New York: Routledge, 1995.

Marcuse, Herbert. One-Dimensional Man. Boston: Beacon Press, 1964.

Marx, Karl. Das Kapital. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1938.

---. "The Eighteenth Brumaire." Karl Marx: Selected Writings. David McClellan, ed. Oxford: Oxford University, 1977.

Mazlish, Bruce. The Fourth Discontinuity: The Co-Evolution of Humans and Machines. New Haven, CT: Yale University, 1993.

Mead, George Herbert. Mind, Self, and Society. Chicago: The University of Chicago, 1934.

Meyrowitz, Joshua. No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior. Oxford: Oxford University, 1985.

McLuhan, Marshal. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. Toronto: University of Toronto, 1962.

---. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Toronto: McGraw-Hill, 1964.

--- (with Quentin Fiore). The Medium is the Massage. New York: Bantam Press, 1967.

--- and Bruce C. Powers. The Global Village: Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st Century. New York: Oxford University, 1989.

Poster, Mark. The Second Media Age. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995.

---. "CyberDemocracy: Internet and the Public Sphere." Internet Culture. David Porter, ed. New York: Routledge, 1996.

Rennie, Bryan S. Reconstructing Eliade: Making Sense of Religion. Albany: State University of New York, 1996.

Rheingold, Howard. The Virtual Community: Surfing the Internet. London: Minerva, 1994.

Ritzer, George. The McDonaldization of Society. Thousand Oaks, California: Pine Forge Press, 2000.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. New York: Washington Square Press, 1956.

Slevin, James. The Internet and Society. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000.

Stock, Gregory. Metaman: The Merging of Humans and Machines into a Global Superorganism. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.

Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Self. Cambridge: Harvard University, 1989.

---. The Ethics of Authenticity. Cambridge: Harvard University, 1991.

Turkle, Sherry. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Touchstone, 1995.