Body 2.0
#communication
The current trends in information technology (Virtual Reality as one of the key technologies) show something that media theory has been describing for decades: a merger of technology and body. The Canadian literary scholar Marshall McLuhan, known for his statement “The medium is the message.”, describes media as extensions or amputations of human body parts. He goes even further when he envisions: „Having extended or translated our central nervous system into the electromagnetic technology, it is but a further stage to transfer our consciousness to the computer world as well.” (McLuhan 1964: 60) And for the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard “virtual machines” are integrated into the human body in such a way that they almost genetically belong to it. (Baudrillard 1997)
We can see that technology not only shapes our daily lives, it actually shapes the human body itself and questions traditional concepts of the human condition. It questions the way we constitute ourselves as ‘human’.
Let’s make this a little more tangible: Clothes and buildings are usually not scrutinized as questionable objects that distance the human from its natural form. On the contrary, the fact that we learned to protect ourselves from unpleasant environmental influences by building tools of all sorts is regarded as one of the major differences between the homo sapiens (first technology creating species) and other life forms. We use language and systems of inscription to transmit and preserve knowledge. We repair or improve our body functions with artificial protheses, transplanted organs, and so on. Just the human ability to see is altered by a huge variety of gadgets: magnifying glasses, telescopes, reading glasses and contact lenses. VR glasses may feel like groundbreaking new steps but actually they are just consequently following the path humanity has embarked upon ever since. At the end of the day, we cannot decide what is natural and what is artificial. The old idea of differentiating between nature and culture (possibly coined by Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico in the early 18st century (Müller-Funk 2006: 67)) has long been superseded. The idea of a natural human body is an illusion. Our body is not what makes us human, it is the technosphere we surround ourselves with that defines the human condition. Our bodies have been augmented from the start.
The current trends in information technology (Virtual Reality as one of the key technologies) show something that media theory has been describing for decades: a merger of technology and body. The Canadian literary scholar Marshall McLuhan, known for his statement “The medium is the message.”, describes media as extensions or amputations of human body parts. He goes even further when he envisions: „Having extended or translated our central nervous system into the electromagnetic technology, it is but a further stage to transfer our consciousness to the computer world as well.” (McLuhan 1964: 60) And for the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard “virtual machines” are integrated into the human body in such a way that they almost genetically belong to it. (Baudrillard 1997)
We can see that technology not only shapes our daily lives, it actually shapes the human body itself and questions traditional concepts of the human condition. It questions the way we constitute ourselves as ‘human’.
Let’s make this a little more tangible: Clothes and buildings are usually not scrutinized as questionable objects that distance the human from its natural form. On the contrary, the fact that we learned to protect ourselves from unpleasant environmental influences by building tools of all sorts is regarded as one of the major differences between the homo sapiens (first technology creating species) and other life forms. We use language and systems of inscription to transmit and preserve knowledge. We repair or improve our body functions with artificial protheses, transplanted organs, and so on. Just the human ability to see is altered by a huge variety of gadgets: magnifying glasses, telescopes, reading glasses and contact lenses. VR glasses may feel like groundbreaking new steps but actually they are just consequently following the path humanity has embarked upon ever since. At the end of the day, we cannot decide what is natural and what is artificial. The old idea of differentiating between nature and culture (possibly coined by Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico in the early 18st century (Müller-Funk 2006: 67)) has long been superseded. The idea of a natural human body is an illusion. Our body is not what makes us human, it is the technosphere we surround ourselves with that defines the human condition. Our bodies have been augmented from the start.
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