The Dictionary of Human Geography

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suburbanandconventional(withpopularonline

environments such as Second Life having more

than seven and half million users in 2007, and a

slogan ‘Your world. Your imagination’ suggest-

ing that most users had fairly conventional

imaginations), while others retained a focus on

gaming. Meanwhile, online sources of informa-

tion have become as usual and familiar as trad-

itional media –withonlineversionsof

conventional media and alternative media

rescalingaudiences,whilethe‘blogosphere’pro-

vides alternative fora (see, e.g., Chang, 2005).

Other new media are woven into our everyday

lives as part and parcel of our normal, material

lives (see, e.g., Morley, 2003; Yoon, 2003):

The 1990s were about the virtual. We were

fascinated by the new virtual spaces made

possible by computer technologies. Images

of an escape into a virtual space that leaves

physical space useless, and of cyberspace – a

virtual world that exists in parallel to our

world – dominated the decade.. .. By the

end of the decade, the daily dose of cyber-

space (using the internet to make plane

reservations, check email using a Hotmail

account, or download MP3 files) became

so much the norm that the original wonder

of cyberspace – so present in the early

cyberpunk fiction of the 1980s and still

evident in the original manifestos of

VRML evangelists of the early 1990s – was

almost completely lost. The virtual became

domesticated. (Manovich, 2006, p. 220)

By the millennium, even as these online

worlds expanded their users, the notion of an

immaterial or ethereal set of worlds as a

modelfor informational landscapes seemed

to miss many dynamics. Most especially, it

missed the increasing mixture of the virtual

into botheveryday lifeand also everyday

spaces. Far from entering a world online, the

informational world began to permeate our

lived environment. Increasingly, processing

power was located in the environment around

us, not just in discrete artefacts called com-

puters. As mobile telephones, ‘smart’ devices

and electronic sensors led automated

responses, the separation of an online and off-

line world seemed anachronistic. mc

Suggested reading

Adams (1997); Crampton (2003); Dodge and

Kitchin (2001a); Kitchin (1998); Nunes (1997).

cyborg The shackling together of ‘cyber-

netic’ and ‘organism’ in the term ‘cyborg’ is

designed to convey the combination ofanimal

(usually humans) and technology. Initially

drawn from science fiction, it has been taken

on to critique technological futures based on

acartesiandivision of mind and body.It

was popularized and developed by Donna

Haraway (1991a) to criticize what she called

amasculinistfantasy of second birthing in

technologicalutopianwriting. This techno-

logical fantasy suggested an ideal of a tran-

scendent union of human and machine, with

people uploading their consciousness into

machines. The aim would be eternal life in a

disembodied state in the realm ofcyberspace.

In cyberpunk writing, this was often depicted as

fusion of hardware and software escaping the

limits of the ‘meatware’ (aka the human body).

This imaginary builds on deep-seated div-

ides of mind and body. Cartesianphilosophy

had powerfully divided thought and world

(res cogitans and res extensa, respectively).

This compounded medieval Christian tradi-

tion, which had developed the model of the

Manichean divide of the spirit and the flesh,

the former being divine and the latter earthly,

sins being located with the body and virtue

with the mind. Feminist critics (seefeminism)

have long pointed out that these divisions

become gendered to associate women with

the body and the material, while men were

associated with logic and thought. The tech-

nological fantasies of escaping the body simply

restaged these debates.

The concept of the cyborg linked flesh and

body to emphasize the materiality of lives and

technological transformations, and to show

that humans are always part of the world and

entangled in technologies. The perspective

links with posthumanism in challenging

an autonomous andfoundationalhumanity.

It implies that human intelligence and con-

sciousness shape, but also are shaped by, tech-

nologies. While ‘suchfeedback loops may

be reaching new levels of intensity as our

environments become smarter and more infor-

mation rich, ... the basic dynamic is as old

as humans’ (Hayles, 2002, p. 303).

The term is also used to point to accelerat-

ing vectors of technological development

in technoscience and biotechnology that

are directly fusing technical implants with

animals, often to restore lost capacities.

In benign ways, this is seen as augmenting

the capacities of bodies. Rather than trans-

cending the body, it is about prostheses that

expand our reach or capacities. More critical

accounts point out that work on ‘human aug-

mentation’ has been most enthusiastically

Gregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_C Final Proof page 140 31.3.2009 9:45pm

CYBORG