“Are you a cyborg?” I still remember when Franco asked this question in the very beginning of this course. To be frank, I think this was a crazy question! Especially when I was told that “a cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political construction, a world-changing fiction.” “Oh my goodness! This is too crazy for me.” (and when I tried to type the word “cyborg” in the Microsoft Word, a red line underlines the word… I was thinking that, “do I need to study a word with red line for the whole semester?...)
I have to admit that this subject is just funnier than I expected! I studied a course about “gender” before entered university. I was shocked by the lectures and theories that I have not even thought of “who am I?” before that gender course. I thought my philosophy to lives has already been changed a lot, and when I see and think about myself and my identity is not as simple as before. Although I have a new concept on myself, I have never thought that I might be a cyborg! After 12 weeks, everytime when I think about what Franco asked us whether we are cyborg, my feeling that “I am.” is getting more and more obvious. I remember the concepts of “online and offline identities” in the course, almost everyday I am using these two identities to live; I remember the concepts of virtual ethics, do something about the Internet or other new technologies we youngsters have get used to equal to something ethically right? I remember the concepts of the technologies blurring the boundaries of the public and private space… New theories and concepts taught in this course give me a brand new way to think about myself, my identity(or identities) even identities of people around me. And finally I think that I am a cyborg. I use computer to express my point of views (like now I am typing the reflective blog); I use other virtual identities to log in and play online games; when I use my webcam on my notebook to chat with my friends, I feel like what Eileen and Adam say, my body seems really plug into the machine and is connected to the mechanics of her equipment. This statement must be very horrible for people who read at the first time (like what I feel before) but after studying this subject for 12 weeks, I think it is so real to me. Moreover, in fact many of us could not be live without the technologies like computers nowadays. We use it to send email to friends, lecturers, people we want to contact at once etc. We can shop online, we can pay school fees online, we can buy movie tickets on the webpage of the cinema.... What we look for now is about "instant", we want everything fast and we just could not wait for more than a second. Technologies help us a lot and eventually most of us could not live without them. We are so relying on them, and therefore the boundaries between we and technologies are becoming more and more unclear. I am not saying that we are the same thing, however, they seem to be part of us now.
For the weblog we used in this course, in my opinion, it is quite interesting to use this weblog to “hand in” our assignments. When I was in secondary school, I typed diaries online using social network like “Xanga” or “Yahoo Blog”. That was rather “private place” for me to express my opinion that I set passwords so as to only allow my good friends to read. Moreover, those online blogs were only about my feelings on something in daily life, which were written in an informal ways like tying “oral” Chinese or English to express. However, the weblog used in this subject is just so different from my previous weblogs. We classmate use this weblog to express our views about something which is related to academic, publicly discussing those topics in a serious way. We do not afraid to let other classmates to know what our opinions are, but willing to discuss in a harmonious way. I think the weblog is very useful for our study and it is worth introducing other subjects to use a weblog like this one for students to express their point of views whenever they get accessed to Internet. As it is common for young people to stay late and do not sleep but using computers till midnight. (Maybe our brains function best in this stage? Hahaa..) And if they do, whenever we got some thoughts about this subject, we could post them on the weblog at once to share with all the classmates and do not need to wait until the next lecture! After all, though some concepts in this course are quite difficult and complicated to understand, they inspire me to think again what my identity is.
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