The articleMy views:
I didn't know who Donna Haraway was, but when I looked her up in
Wikipedia I found it to be much more interesting and more comprehensive than the article we were assigned to read but perhaps that's just because the formatting of the assigned article made it hard to keep track of where in the article I was.
However, the idea I came away from the article with was that Cyborgs were about building humans stronger. Originally, stronger for war. Now, the closest we come to a cyborg is using robotics to repair people. And these people, not exclusively, but enough for me to make this claim, are needing repair because of war. The question that arises in my head, if we weren't trying to create more powerful war machines, if we weren't constantly at war or in military actions, would there currently be such a demand in the improvement of prosthetics, a rush to create "cyborgs" to improve damaged human bodies. I wonder whether without war injuries if there would be enough people needing to have prosthetics to create such a high demand. The next question I have is, if war results in creating the technology for "cyborg" people was it worth it? Or could we have gotten there without war, would there have been enough of an interest?
People may only want to improve themselves for a competitive edge in which case the whole concept of cyborg would only develop in order to be faster, stronger, smarter, so that you could out-smart, out-speed, and out-strength another person. People don't want to improve for the sole reason of being faster, smarter, and stronger. Therefore without the drive to be better then someone else this concept of cyborg would never have existed. The idea of using it to repair damage only came later, when the faster, stronger, and smarter failed and left irreparable damage.
I found the article very stimulating, though I felt I missed many of the key points of the article. The concepts about sexual equality were to vague for me to understand.
a interesting article on prostheticswe-make-money-not-art is an interesting website that I look at very occasionally, but they do have a
cyborg section that I noticed after I finished the homework.