I-cyborg: disability, affect and public pedagogy

In 2008 Elizabeth underwent a cochlear implant. The necessary but traumatic operation was approached in her usual creative way. To begin, Elizabeth researched the medical process and the ways other individuals had experienced the procedure and its aftermath. Then she set about documenting her personal response through Facebook, providing often confronting images of her transformation (as she put it) into a cyborg. This paper is a conversation between the two authors of this article, reflecting on and analysing Elizabeth's experience within the wider context of bodily enhancement and cosmetic surgery and exploring the role of the social networking site Facebook as a kind of public pedagogy that functions through affect. The two authors reflect first on Elizabeth's experience and her motives for such a public performance. Second, they explore some of the wider, underlying questions of negotiated subjectivity impacted by our ever-growing intimate and symbiotic relationship to new technologies. They argue that human beings evolving into 'cyborgs', as a result of new technological applications together with greater media convergence and digital technologies of social networking, offers an exciting potential for affective cultural interventions, new understandings of what it means to be human.