Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
sophisticated technologies of modern life that might otherwise seem
overwhelming. Thus, the telephone extends a person's ability to hear and
speak; television extends the effective perceptual range of one's eyes and
ears; automobiles, trains, ships, airplanes, and so forth, are an extension
of the mobility provided by human legs. The happy lesson that the exten-
sionist vision inspires is that enormous technological systems developed
for corporate and military purposes eventually come to benefit everyday
folks. During the so-called space age and era of multimedia spectacles,
many found it thrilling to imagine themselves enlarged and augmented
by guided missiles and satellite communications. For many, this was good
news because it suggested individuals could overcome the limitations of
biological forms and abilities received at birth. Hence, during the era of
Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter, McLuhanesque fan-
tasies of the “global village” along with dreams of the colonization of
space gave hope to technophiles, especially in the United States.
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By the
1990s, such dreams had by and large shifted to a new technical template,
the Internet.
But despite the insistence that “technology is humanity extended,”
despite the growing sense that humans and technical systems are inti-
mately connected, extensionist renderings of the story still assume that
electronic and other technologies are to a considerable degree distinct
from the human organism itself. Yes, one frequently attaches new media
to one's limbs and sense organs. But these devices are not in themselves
regarded as intrinsic features of human beings; they are long links that
could at any moment be disconnected and replaced with extensions of
another variety, or by none at all. It remained for another turn in think-
ing about the relationship between humanity and technology to take a
further step, affirming that there is actually no meaningful boundary
between humans and technology at all.
Within prominent fields of social theory today—science studies and
cultural studies, for example—commonly used categories point to a con-
tinual, pervasive blending of nature and artifice. Among the more
popular names for these blended entities are “hybrid,” “quasi-object,”
and “cyborg,” with events that bring such creations into being called
“implosions” and “boundary crossings.” The initial stimulus for notions
of this kind came from a growing sense that the objects studied by social
scientists and humanists should be regarded as social and cultural con-
