Page 74 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

CYBORG

CYBERNETICS

Cybernetics is a science of communication concerned primarily with
the controlling of information within biological or man-made
systems. Its primary focus is the adaptive or self-controlling abilities
of systems – from howpeople perform logic to the possibilities for
artificial intelligence or problem-solving (heuristic) computer pro-
gramming. As such, it is an interdisciplinary pursuit ranging across
mathematics, biology, psychology, logic and communications.
Central to the science of cybernetics is the principle of feedback,
whereby the output is relayed back to modify the input. For example,
automatic systems within a car may have sensing devices that change
the temperature inside the car according to signals received from the
environment. Cybernetics often focuses on intelligent, or human-like,
behaviour as well as on technological and biological innovation.
See also: Cyborg

CYBORG

The image of the cyborg describes a fusion between human and
machine, the organic and the technological. Cyborgs exist nowin our
everyday lives in such forms as artificial limbs, immunisation,
pacemakers and Internet chat rooms. In all of these technologies the
division between the body and the machine is difficult to locate.
Culturally, the cyborg allows for the creation of strategic identities in a
technologically mediated society.
The cyborg was first invoked in the cultural studies context by
Donna Haraway in her 1984 essay A Manifesto for Cyborgs. The cyborg,
for Haraway, is a concept through which a feminist dialogue can be
opened up, but one capable of avoiding socialist-feminist appeals to an
organic, or natural, state of femaleness. Any appeal to unity denies the
fact that gender and class consciousness are forced upon us by
historical experience. Haraway sees it as more useful to look for
invention and hybridity in place of wholeness and essentialism, what
she calls a ‘feminist science’. In cyborg theory, technology is not seen
as a threat but accepted as having merged with the natural to the point
at which the boundaries are no longer fixed but are instead recognised
as constructs and tools of domination that can be shifted and
challenged. As the cyborg is a hybrid of organism and machine it is
therefore ‘the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal

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