Growing Up Cyborg: Development Stories for Postmodern Children

Cyborgification is a dual process of fragmenting the human body and decentering subjectivities. Like the distinction between an elaborated speech code, based on and capable of abstraction, and a restricted one focused on the local and particular (Bernstein 1971), learning styles of bodily control and movement can be implicated in “class reproduction” and the reproduction of gender. Children are growing up cyborg between the extremes of disembodiment presented by the possibilities of life in cyberspace and the complete reduction to embodiment posited for production workers subject to the machinations of hypermobile global capital in export zones.