Laura Jacobs's Preface
I have taken medicines and other products of the biotech industry, I have had surgeries, I have even availed myself of counseling, that great modernist tool of personhood. I am addicted to my computer, my cell phone, and books produced on another great tool of knowledge, the printing press. I wear clothes. I play the piano. I eat bread. My sense of self is intimately connected to these internal and external 'extensions', and I suspect most of the others are similar. Does that make us cyborgs? Is a bird that whacks a nut against a tree to get at the food inside equally a cyborg? I don't know.
Many say we live in a time of great change where 'what it means to be human' is in transition. Again, I'm not so sure. Perhaps it has always been in transition. Perhaps what is important is not to define our 'human-ness', or our 'cyborg-ness', neither of which have we done in this project. Perhaps what is important is that we ask the questions, and explore. And I invite the reader to do the same.
Perhaps that is what makes us human. |
