Noreen's E-learning and Digital Cultures Blog

“what we made and what we became co-evolved together”

The central idea of this second article seems to revolve around the correlation between increasingly sophisticated tools and human evolution. Are we replacing dualism with parallelism?! Hayles almost seems to suggest that this close relationship with ‘tools’ has altered human consciousness – suggesting an almost Prensky-esque world where our brains (well digital natives anyway) are now ‘wired’ differently to reflect this?

The cyborg was a symbol, a representation of what was happening to the relationship between technology and humans. Hayles calls the cyborg “a virtual icon for capitalism” but since then, things have moved on and the cyborg is too ‘singular’ and doesn’t represent the networked reality of the Internet or web.

What is important is the ‘relation’ or ‘interaction’ as a unit of analysis, moving out to a network of such relations or interactions. The human subject with agency and free will is no longer – “agency is always relational and distributed”. Post-humans work as a group, or a hive, like worker bees?