Becoming Cyborg

Abstract

AbstractIn the digital age, anonymity has become an inherent part of everyday communication. Online communication allows for expressing our identities differently. This chapter explores how modes of disidentification come into play in political engagement online. It revisits the poststructuralist-inspired debate on cyberdemocracy that explains the digital self as existing only through the words it utters. This debate imagines an increase in personal freedom by ‘leaving the body behind’ and conceptualizes cyberspace as a separate realm that follows its own logics. Current debates, in contrast, insist on collapsing digital and physical space. The chapter develops a new theory of digital space beyond these two positions. By engaging with cyberfeminist debates, it explains digital space as an assemblage of material objects, sentient bodies, and performative expressions, in which the material dimension is profoundly reconfigured. Material space is mediated and interrupted by digital interfaces. This theory of digital space allows for rethinking the politics of presence. Explaining the subject of the digital age as a cyborgian assemblage of human bodies and technological devices, the chapter develops the concept of a digital politics of presence. As cyborgs, we interpret our bodies and ourselves differently through the exposure to digital content. Several empirical examples demonstrate that a digital politics of presence allows for the expression of marginalized identities but at the same time renders identity transformative. It expands the agency of the subject to reassemble the self both online and offline.