Using the cyborg to re-think young people’s uses of Facebook

Abstract

The use of information technologies by young people is commonly understood to be a separate, often risky, activity and a distinct form of sociality. Challenging the dominant understanding, this article applies Haraway's cyborg theory to explore how Facebook-mediated relationships are interconnected with material relationships and daily social life. Young people's perspectives are privileged through 40 face-to-face interviews in two rural Victorian towns. The cyborg metaphor highlights the fluid melding of various conceptual dualisms altered in the overlap between the virtual environs of Facebook and the material, everyday lives of the young participants, analysed here using the cyborg metaphor. In this sense, Facebook can be best understood as an individualised extension of young people's broader social lives, part of a larger suite of information technologies, social media and other mediated sociality that is interconnected with materially based, face-toface interactions.

Of Cyborgs and Brutes: Technology-Inherited Violence and Ignorance

“…The untarnished fertility of Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto was recently shown by a paper interestingly exploring the cyborg-like features of Facebook [7]. While we will later return to its recent use, it is worth sparing a few words on Haraway's contentions.…”

“…Our claim is that this presumed moral gap is a biased artifact of the analysis, informed by the honest (but untrue) answers of the subjects: what is perceived as a distance between the virtual world and real life is actually caused by the loss of references of the biological organisms (with the evolutionary inherited endowments concerning sub moralities and the enforcement of coalitions [32,33]), and the acquisition of the new references (social, too) pertaining to the DACC cyborg. Empirical research carried out to study "the transferability of basic interpersonal affect, or affinity/disaffinity, from nonverbal to verbal communication accompanying the alternative communication channels of Face-to-Face versus Computer-Mediated Communication" [34] (p. 56) seem to confirm that moral proximity is indeed not impaired by the lack of physical presence: 7 Although concerns about the lack of cues in Computer-Mediated Communication may persist with regard to determining participants' identity, or the reduction of message equivocality, as functions of bandwidth and interface design, affinity issues may be different and readily translatable from one cue system to another [34] (p. 58).…”

“…. ] More than a 'space' or a 'destination', Facebook can be conceived of as a virtual network of interacting 'digital bodies' [7] (p. 4).…”

“…Waite and Bourke [7], referring to research they conducted in a Australian rural community, stressed the cyborgean nature of social networking itself: phones and computers are the gateways to a world that is not self-standing (as a Second Life, or World of Warcraft would be), but augments the material reality that people live in everyday. Anticipating some conclusive remarks of this paper, it must be acknowledged how the subtlety displayed by social networking websites, and other kinds of pro-social technologies, in determining our existence as cyborgs begs for a cognitive and philosophical analysis.…”

“…Another reason justifying the cognitive interest in the diffused cyborg is still spelled out by Waite and Bourke [7], in their contention that Facebook itself, as most SNS, can be conceptualized as a massive, loosely bordered, cyborg-blending human and cybernetic parts. In this sense, it may be valuable to add that the dualism-collapsing might of the cyborg does not only concern the human/machine dichotomy, but the self/other one as well.…”